The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia says that pets can help build your child’s self-esteem and self-confidence.
They can also enrich your child’s emotional development by:
- Offering your child important exposure to issues like reproduction, birth, illness, accidents, death and grief.
- Teaching your child responsibility.
- Providing a connection to nature and teaching respect, empathy and patience for other living things.
- Offering unconditional love, loyalty, affection and comfort.
Having a dog in our house has saved my sanity about a million times. He cleans up all of the food my son throws on the floor and makes him laugh after he’s just bumped his head or fallen.
