One unexpected benefit of adopting Annie, my family’s 40-pound lop-eared dog, is the calming effect she has had on my children. They often come home from a long day at school and lie on the floor next to Annie’s bed, quietly, while she licks their fingers and cheeks. Or they rub her tummy, taking a breather before moving on to dinner and homework and whatever else needs to be done before bed.
Annie is a real fidget with boundless energy, but her mere presence in our home calms my children in ways I never imagined when we brought her home over a year ago.
A recently published study sheds light on that powerful child-canine connection. She found that twice-weekly sessions with a dog and her handler significantly lowered the children’s levels of cortisol – the body’s stress hormone – as measured through saliva samples. The intervention appeared to be more effective than the guided relaxation sessions.
“Our study demonstrates, for the first time, that dog-assisted interventions can reduce stress in children, with and without special educational needs, during a typical school year,” says Kerstin Meints, a professor of developmental psychology at the University of Lincoln, in England, and one of the study researchers.
In his team’s randomized and controlled trial, published in the journal PLOS ONE, 149 neurotypical and non-neurotypical British children aged 8 and 9 participated, who were classified into three groups.
In one group, the children spent 20 minutes twice a week for a month with a trained dog and its handler. They would pet the dog for a few minutes if the dog and children were willing, ask a few questions and play. In another group, children performed relaxation exercises for the same length of time without any dogs around, doing things like wiggling their fingers and toes before lying on yoga mats to listen to a guided meditation. A third group served as controls.
The researchers took saliva samples from all the children to measure their cortisol levels before and after the four weeks of testing, and also measured the neurotypical children’s cortisol levels before and after each session. Overall, they found that children in the dog intervention group had lower cortisol levels than their peers in both the relaxation and control groups.
“As a full-time clinical trainer working with a dog at the center, I’m not surprised that this study yields such positive results,” said Ali Spikestein, coordinator of the Paws and Play canine program at Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital in New York, who did not participated in the new study.
Spikestein knows the therapeutic potential of dogs well, working with his hospital’s three goldendoodles – golden retriever/poodle mixes – to sit and sometimes snuggle with children who are in significant pain or struggling with simple fact of being in a hospitable environment. However, he said it was “exciting and promising” to see a new study looking specifically at the role dogs could play in calming healthy children in schools.
In fact, researchers and mental health professionals say that more research is really needed on how animal-assisted interventions of all kinds can help children. Meints also hopes that more controlled trials and longer-term studies will be conducted that can answer questions about how often children should participate in dog-assisted therapy sessions and for how long.
There are also big questions about the importance of children being able to touch the dog during sessions, or whether it is enough for them to be in the animal’s presence, he said, and whether group or individual therapy is better.
As tempting as it is for parents like me to extrapolate, there’s a big difference between canine therapy and the kind of unpredictable interactions kids and pets have when they’re just hanging out together at home. Although research has shown that owning a dog can be good for children’s psychological development.
“There’s a difference between a trained animal and a house pet,” says Dr. Arun Handa, a psychiatrist in the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “That said, it’s not unreasonable that pets in the home can provide some kind of comfort and support,” he says.
Regardless of the setting, children need to be taught to interact with dogs, and the American Academy of Pediatrics offers parents guidance on choosing and living with a family pet. Children in the new study were reminded before sessions not to kiss, hug or climb on their therapy dogs in any way, and were always closely watched by adults. The team looked for signs that the dogs were unhappy, such as nose licking, body or head turning away, or repeated yawning, and ended any session in which the dogs seemed tired or unwilling to participate further.
I can attest that in my own home, that type of training is ongoing. Sometimes I have to remind my kids to give Annie her space; other times, she is the one who needs to be reminded. But more often than not, my children and my dog ??seem to share an emotional understanding that I can’t help but feel is good for them. “Animals provide this unconditional love,” Handa says, “and they come from a place of nonjudgmental support.”
