Customer Reviews

The Dog Trainer's Guide to Parenting: Rewarding Good Behavior, Practicing Patience and Other Positive Techniques That Work

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Finding "the DOG trainers guide to PARENTING" while looking for a book to train my new puppy is the answer to my prayers. Other methods I've tried have been ineffective and left me feeling impotent as a parent. Mr. Hansen's approach involves none of the useless "psycho-babble" that is so prevelant in parenting books today. He makes the reader aware of the many different mistakes parents make but have no idea they are making. He very concretely lays out a road map for successful parenting through the use of his own life experiences and illustrates his points with examples from is interactions with dog owners that have come to him for help. As well as being helpful and informative, the book is very light-hearted, entertaining and easy to read.

It doesn't matter how you feel about dogs, if you need help with becoming a better parent, this is the book to read. Positive changes were made in my home before I was even half-way through the book!

I had the good fortune to take my pit bull Anubis to one of Mr Hansen's classes and have been a fan ever since. It is a lot of fun to watch the silly mistakes people make with kids (& dogs), and realize that you would likely be doing the same thing without his advice. Some of the advice is so obvious you'll wonder why you never considered it this way before. Nothing short of a revelation!

This is a very accessible book--easy reading, concise (under 200 pages) and full of illustritive anecdotes. I found it a great resoruce for raising our GSD and there were some equally applicible insights on parenting my 7 year old, since the same principels work in both arenas--clarity, consistency, leadership, etc.

Definitely a worthwhile read.

This little book packs a lot of emotional intelligence into a readable message. The focus is on building up kid's confidence and common sense by being consistent in your parenting. Using dog training as a parallel makes the points easier to understand and shows how we can avoid making common mistakes. It's helped me understand much more about being a positive presence in the lives of those I love.

The author of this book, for all his sincerity, is an old school dog-trainer. In recent years we've learned that we can get better results with dogs, not by choking them with prong collars, but by training the things we want them to do in positive ways. The same goes for raising our children.

There are some nuggets in the book. He talks a lot about making sure you're speaking in an understandable language to your children and your pets. For example, in one section, he talks about a mother saying to her child, "Be careful!" When he asks what she means, she says, "Stay on the sidewalk." He then asks, "So, when I'm driving and you say, Be Careful, I should stay on the sidewalk?" It's true we aren't often clear in our expectations of our children or our dogs and expect them to know what we mean even if we don't explain ourselves. He's right! That isn't fair!

If you want children who don't rebel, you have to be ready to encourage all that is good about them. This book seems to be about focusing on catching the bad and punishing it out of them. He encourages the use of choke collars on dogs, and similar techniques on children... just without the physical device.

But most of all, this book is about dog training by a dog trainer with a few seemingly random ties to parenting. Harold Hansen married a woman with children and we don't know how old they are when he became their step father. We don't know what his experiences are as a father. We know he has been a dog trainer for a long time.

There are some things to learn in here... but other books come more highly recommended.