GUEST POST: From Barking to Bonding
What My Reactive Dog Taught Me about Parenting
I’m thrilled to welcome
(“oh-check”) to the Guest Post series of Dog Lover’s Guide! I’ve long admired Cindy’s passion for animal rescue, insight into the parallels between human and animal experiences, and brilliant (award-winning!) writing.
Cindy is all-in when it comes to making the world better for pets and their people. Her Substack newsletter, Like People, Like Pets, centers around the surprising parallels she discovered between parenting her kids and caring for sixty foster animals that have called her house a temporary home. She also curates PetStack, a newsletter of stories and photos celebrating the unique bonds between readers and their furry, feathered, scaled, and slithering family members. Cindy was recently awarded the Maxwell Medallion by the Dog Writers Association of America for her story 22,000 Acts of Lovingkindness about what it takes to save a life.
“Aaack,” I screamed and body twitched as I rounded the corner from the kitchen to find two people kneeling on my entry floor. They were petting Shiloh. She wasn’t barking.
“What’s going on?” I stammered as I tried to calm my heart while watching my daughter, who no longer lives at home, and her friend, Jon, who’d never met Shiloh, petting my reactive dog. “How did you get in the house without a peep from Shiloh?”
Plink. A small piece of kibble dropped from the pocket of Jon’s pants and skittered across the floor. Food! The almighty tamer of the beast. Mia confessed that she and Jon had stopped at the dog food bin in the garage where he had loaded his pockets before entering. Shiloh must have sensed the bonanza.
With kibble at the ready, we proceeded to have the first uninterrupted dinner with a guest at our table in five years since we adopted Shiloh. She spent the meal with her chin resting on Jon’s thigh. Jon spent the meal doling out treats.
Taking the lead from Jon, a veterinary student, I now carry copious amounts of kibble when I walk. I hand these to my neighbors who in turn offer them to Shiloh. Because of Jon’s trick, I’m able to chat with neighbors rather than wave through her barking from afar.
Food is often an on-ramp to earning Shiloh’s trust. It provides an opportunity for her to learn that I can protect her. She doesn’t always have to protect me.
When my kids were young, we enjoyed an easy love and desire for closeness. We baked together, molded creatures out of play dough, road bikes through the obstacle courses we drew on the driveway with chalk and built sand castles at many beaches in our state of 10,000 lakes. Trust was easy in our “parents in charge” family.
Somewhere between the girls’ tweens and teens, a seismic shift in our relationship occurred. Arguments and door slamming were often peppered with “I hate you.” That easy trust between parent and child became a fragile snowflake threatening to melt.
I began to harbor a feeling of anxiety that something was amiss beyond typical adolescent angst. My teens’ behavior felt outside the norm. In the loneliness of change, I couldn’t help but wonder where my husband and I had gone wrong.
Unmoored by the dramatic shift in our relationship, we sought help from the medical community. Intensive evaluations concluded that both girls were struggling with anxiety, depression, and ADHD. We began a child-focused series of interventions, from medications to classroom adaptations to individual therapy.
But healthy family bonds are not sustained from healthier children alone. A lasting family bond requires all threads to be strong. That realization led to family therapy, marriage counseling, and individual adult therapy. Along the way, the proverbial light bulb came on. My husband and I had been parenting our teens as we’d been parented. We needed help to salvage the useful, toss the bad, and look for new solutions. We also relinquished the need to be makers of our teens’ unfolding maps.
The more freedom we gave them to forge their own journeys the more confidence they gained to right their course. As our parenting evolved from a place of control to one of safe harbor stronger threads were forged.
Just as Jon’s simple gift of kibble opened the door to Shiloh’s trust, I’ve learned that meeting my daughters where they are—with patience, understanding, and a willingness to let go of control—has allowed our family bond to strengthen in unexpected ways. Sometimes the most profound breakthroughs in any relationship come not from forcing our will, but from finding that perfect “treat” that creates a bridge of trust and mutual respect.
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