Parenting: Grooming Teenagers with Pet Culture (Part 2) -By Edwin Alivionote

Edwin Alivionote

When a child grows into becoming a teenager, the child automatically falls into the emotional age bracket. The pet-culture for kids which is basically built around still life dolls becomes less attractive as bonding pet to the teen. Although so many teenagers still find pleasure with keeping dolls, the idea is warm but less impacting like their pairs who keep life pets in form of animals.

While a pet is generally kept for the pleasure that it can give to its owner, often, especially with horses, dogs, and cats, as well as with some other animals, this pleasure appears to be mutual. Thus, pet keeping can be described as a symbiotic relationship, one that benefits both animals and human beings. As the keeping of pets has been practiced from prehistoric times to the present and as pets are found in nearly every culture and society, pet keeping apparently satisfies a deep, universal human need.

The teenager who is at the core of learning decision making because of the fact that dependency on the parents for some decision has been cut of, needs to learn this well through the aid of pets. An excerpt from Max’s Healing Hearts Community helps us get the psychology of what pets do to the teenager; ‘Throughout our relationship with our four-legged family, we are faced with having to make many decisions on their behalf. These might be as simple as where to go for a walk today, or what kibble they might have on a daily basis. At some other time complex and stressful as, how to manage an illness or when to make the hardest decision of them all. Our decisions ultimately build upon our relationship, and form a bond. When it comes to making hard decisions on behalf of our pets, we can freeze and act unsure of what to do. We say, “they can’t tell me what they want, so how can I know for sure?” but there are many ways to tell what they need. We often second guess our decisions, feel immense guilt for making them, and wonder if we did the right thing for them’.

Parenting your teenager with pet-culture starting from the pre-puberty age of 8 might just become the best step towards formulating a foundation for making good decisions for the complexities that the teenager confronts emotionally. The pet which the parents are required to buy as gift for the teenager has a very important binding force between the child and parent.

Most often when the child grows into the teen age, conversation between them and parents become less likely to arise. The need to keep matters to self increases, while the urge for parents to probe their minds becomes a pester attitude. But, the relationship with the pet opens the door for conversation and mutual communication between the young adult and the parents. This singular point of common interest can birth other conversations that are necessarily productive between the parents and their teenage child. There is more potential for finding issues around raising life pet that will expose some real learnable lessons for the teenager which will be more appreciated than learned by another means.