by Suzanne Fort

Created on: November 11, 2008

I am a classroom therapist who uses the Theraplay model with emotionally damaged children. The basic concept of this model is that children are going to be emotionally healthy when they are loved, praised, and treated positively in their lives. Working with emotionally damaged kindergartnerss I have come to realize that this model truly does work. I used to think it was silly and absurd.

Theraplay focuses on the positive and doesn't attend to the negatives. So, when a child acts up, unless it's dangerous, the behavior is ignored. The positive behavior is rewarded with stickers, praise, prizes, etc. After a while, the incentives aren't even needed. The child just does the positive and decreases (or completely eliminates) the negative behaviors.

The same concept can work with animals. Obviously our dog will not want to have stickers or prizes, but they do love praise and to be given affection (petting dog). If you give a dog a nice pet or a dog treat (not too many though) for their positive behavior and completely ignore the dog when it's doing something negative, the dog is going to realize that the good behavior is what brings good things and the negative behavior gets the dog ignored. We all crave love and positive attention. Dogs are no exception. They want love and positive attention. They want to be petted when they do something positive, but don't want to be verbally or physically abused when they do something wrong.

There is another side to this. You could decide to do corrective based training and hit the dog or spray water in the dog's face or put an electric shock collar on the dog. Do you realize that every time you use one of these physical corrective based training ideas that your dog is going to need it more often and more intense each time for the punishment to work? All of those things are pretty disgusting in my opinion and downright abusive. You could also do the fun task of saying, "Bad dog" every time the dog does something inappropriate.

The better thing to do is to do positive reinforcement. Be positive with your dog. A dog is a member of your family for life and you need to treat the dog as you would a child. You can always try positive reinforcement first and if that doesn't seem to work for you, go to the corrective based training. If you're confused or stuck on what to do, consult your veterinarian or a pet trainer in your area.

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