Deciding to get a Therapy dog

We have considered bringing another dog into our household for a while now and here is our journey in doing so.

Have you ever thought how a dog may help your child to live with ADHD?

We have been wondering this for a while and given my son is very animal minded we have started to look into to.

I am going to be starting a series of blogs and videos which will take your through our journey of choosing a puppy to start to train as a therapy dog to help him through the difficult times.

This all came about when we did a group therapy session with a local psychologist who used therapy dogs in her group sessions. The sessions may have only been for 5 weeks but the change we saw in him during this time was amazing.

The research began……..

I looked into how having a therapy dog could help him, how we would go about training one, what was the right breed and how he would handle having a dog.

You see we already had a dog but unfortunately the breed we had and the energy that my son oozed did not mix very well, so the dog pretty much “packed up and left” our household by his own choice and moved in with my parents who live on the same block as ours.

So we knew that choosing the right breed was essential.

We knew we didn’t want a big breed as we just didn’t have the back yard for that, (we have lots of beautiful gardens) so we decided it must be small to mid-size. We knew that a lot of the small breeds were not suitable as they can get very snippy when it comes to big boisterous children. We love our collie breeds so we looked at Shetland Sheepdogs (Miniature Collies) and Border Collies. I also mentioned a King Charles Cavalier to my husband as they are quite smart and placid but he doesn’t like spaniels.

So I set off to speak to breeders to see what the best breed was. It had to be smart, rosbust and really set up to be a therapy dog of sorts.

Now let’s make this clear, I wasn’t looking for a full on therapy dog in the true sense of the word as I knew that would be a great deal of money to pay for that. I just wanted a dog that I could train myself (with help) and train to help my son through the tough times and be his friend when no one else wanted to.

I had to find the right dog for his needs. After a few months we decided that a Border Collie would be that dog and after speaking with a few breeders I found one that had therapy dogs before in their bloodline, so I knew the dogs would be suited for it.

So we visited the puppies and chose one and the bonding began.

If you are looking at getting a dog for your child living with ADHD I strongly recommend that you get a dog that is hardy, one that can put up with their energy and one that won’t end up shying away or being scared of your child, otherwise it defeats the purpose of having a dog.

Feel free to follow me on our journey of bringing home the puppy and the training that we do. I think this is going to be an amazing journey!

Tagged ADD, ADHD, ADHD Conference, Behaviour, BEYOND THE MAZE, Brisbane, coach, Deception Bay, medication, REdcliffe, rothwell, support, Therapy, Therapy Dog