Ask anyone who grew up with a pet about their memories of the experience and they will tell you heartfelt stories of true friendship, happiness and untainted love.
Pets mean so much to children and writers of children’s books know how to take advantage of this to make millions in book sales.
Pick up a book from a young child’s bookshelf and you’re more likely to find an animal protagonist than a human one. Children choose story books about animal characters than human characters for a reason. They can’t get enough of them and there seems to be an spiritual explanation for this affinity.
As it turns out pets have a positive impact on the mental health and general wellbeing of children and children seem to know this intuitively hence the strong attraction to them.
Many parents intuitively feel that looking after an animal can offer children valuable lessons about caregiving, responsibility and empathy.
It’s really important, especially for young kids, to learn that someone’s perspective might be different from their own,” says Megan Mueller, associate professor of human-animal interaction at Tufts University, US. “That’s an easier lesson to learn, perhaps, with an animal than it is with, say, a sibling or a peer.”
Claims about the beneficial impacts of pets on children go further, suggesting that pets can influence children’s social skills, physical health, and even cognitive development. Pets are also associated with higher levels of empathy in children.
In one pair of studies, children made fewer errors on an object-categorization task and needed fewer prompts in memory tasks when there was a dog in the room.
Another study involving 4,000 children at ages five and seven proved that pet ownership was associated with fewer peer problems and more prosocial behavior. Another one proved that children aged two to five with a family dog were more active, spent less time on screens and slept more on average than those without a pet.
Pets mean so much more to children than their natural attraction to them. As it turns out animals make children better humans.
