How my degree and dog walking has shaped my approach to parenting.... Environment, environment, environment, nurture, nurture, nurture.
A lot of people look at my degree and my job and think what skill is it that I could be providing to those that spend time around me asides from having an understanding of the animal kingdom and offering a service that working families with pets depend on to meet their animal’s daily needs, but I can assure you that a degree in Zoology is no walk in the park, pun intended!
The degree is in fact, exhaustive and comprehensive and offers students the opportunity to develop and hone their niche becoming experts in a more specialised field having studied at least the taxonomic kingdom’s of organisms described on earth. Starting the journey of a degree in Zoology begins with how life on earth started and includes developing an understanding of chemistry and animal, bacterial, prokaryotic and bacterial biology. I’m not sure if this is what people expect? Comments below, please.
By the time you reach third year, however, you begin to enhance the more visual study of vertebrates (or not, like me, who studies invertebrates) and consider how can this be applied into the field of animal behaviour. This is where we begin to get naysayers who consider the study of animal behaviour to be a simple job of converting how many times an animal scratched it’s head into how stressed it may be feeling in a zoo setting. I think these people have forgotten or have never learned one simple chore which none of the “friends” cast could remember of Chandler Bing’s job either: statistics. Animal behaviour, simply, is not a simple breeze. From analysing and interpreting behaviour, to having a deep and thorough understanding of “why” the behaviour occurs at all is a very big gap that takes time to comprehend. But enough of me, cheerleading for my peers and the thousands of other students that yearly, manage to get a degree in Zoology, how has my journey shaped my parenting and dog walking career? Environment, environment, environment, nurture, nurture, nurture.
My degree and my job as a dog walker has taught me a lot about children and dogs, and the simple common denominator that the two have in common? Curiosity about the world. So for my children I follow the “hygge” style of parenting which is to make use of outdoor nurseries throughout the entire year, we volunteer with the Scottish wildlife trust once a month at one of their nature reserves and dress for the weather. This provides access to young children and the outdoors in appropriate settings. We use afterschool clubs and nurseries rather than stay inside whilst mummy is working, because were privileged enough to live in a country that provides affordable childcare and I also model a lot myself, with activities that my children find interesting such as yoga, swimming and running, where they join me every Saturday in the pram with a hot chocolate!
Building on the finer details of what my children are doing by having an environment set up for them where they can play with minimal rules is that they do behaviours they enjoy the most and are building autonomy. And this is my gold star for parenting. Nurture, nurture, nurture. By setting up an environment where children (or animals, I’ll explain this a later paragraph) can choose which decisions they make, which toys they want to play with, they are constantly enhancing their autonomy and independent decision making, free from external pressure. This is what children want to do most of all. So, what does home look like? A sandpit in the garden, a box of toys in every single room (except mine, where my bed is a bouncy castle) and access to engage or disengage from activities they either do or don’t enjoy… and all of this leads me to, personalities.
So, the science is in. Personalities do exist. Science supports evidence which suggests that behavioural traits such as sociability, fearfulness and aggressiveness can be measurable parameters that can influence indirect fitness, such as cooperation, risk taking and ecological processes like distribution as well. So, do personalities exist among children and animals and are they genetically effected? Yes, the science suggests they are. But the science also suggests that behaviour is influenced by learning history, (what has the actor already learned), environment (what is the actor being exposed to, both external cues, other animals, homework etc. and internal cues, such as hunger, thirst etc), and genetics, which brings us back to… Nurture.
So how do I apply nurture to my dog walking business? We expose the dog’s we walk to walking areas which are wild enough that dogs can exhibit their predetermined behavioural traits, without reaching too far into overarousal. Dogs have the opportunity to perform the predatory sequence with each other, meeting their daily needs through play. If they are less playful and more independent, dog’s can meet their daily needs by expressing their autonomy in the walk by disengaging from play attempts, which will be supported by us and sniffing, carrying, digging, chasing etc. We focus, (like I do with my children) on supplying different textures for dog’s to explore, from gravel paths, to muddy puddles, to heather and bog land, to grassy plains. The walks we choose to visit reinforce these opportunities to explore. We mix the walks up, walking in different locations and provide as much as possible an ability for all the dog’s we walk to express as much of their personality as possible, reaching for that animal management and parenting gold star, autonomy and nurture.
I hope this helps people to understand a little bit about my background in education and my career thus far. Nurturing doesn’t necessarily provide immediate results which are Instagram worthy in 15 seconds or flashy tv shows, however, it does offer lifelong results of happiness and confidence in independent decision making, free from coercion and pressure. If you have any questions, let me know!
Cass
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