Teaching Young People Responsibility through Pet Care
Animal Chronicles
March 23, 2025
By Dan Barner
Teaching Young People Responsibility through Pet Care
Pets require daily feeding, exercise and attention. By involving your children with these tasks, you can teach them the importance of caring for a living being as well as the importance of consistency. Explain to your child that their pet depends on them for their needs, just as a child depends on their parents. This can instill a sense of responsibility in your child. Include your child in trips to the veterinarian, dog groomer and pet food store so they see all aspects of proper pet care.
Creating a pet-care routine is an excellent lesson for children. A daily schedule that charts when each task will be completed shows children how to create a plan and how to stick to a plan. Learning the power of routines is of great value for our youth. This routine will also teach children to take responsibility for their behavior, as they will have set tasks to see through to completion each day.
Caring for pets also teaches empathy. Pets have needs and feelings that should be respected. By explaining to your children how important it is to have compassion for their pet, they will learn empathy. This includes happy days when their pet wants someone to play with, and difficult days when their pet isn’t feeling well and needs extra care.
Here at the Animal Protective Foundation we have many opportunities for youth to be involved with pet care. We always have many wonderful pets available for adoption including dogs, cats, rabbits and guinea pigs. We also need foster families to temporarily care for pets.
If owning or fostering a pet isn’t the right fit for your family, your child can still make a huge impact on the lives of pets in need while also learning responsibility through activities such as organizing a pet-supply donation drive, creating a fundraiser, making colorful “adopt me” posters to hang in our shelter and putting up APF event fliers in the community. We even invite children to read to our shelter cats!
Pet care is a wonderful way to build life skills in our youth. When determining how your child will be involved in the care of a pet, be sure to assign age-appropriate tasks, set realistic expectations and provide positive reinforcement to encourage continued responsibility.
Together we can make great life lessons for children, create wonderful lives for pets and develop the next generation of responsible pet owners, volunteers and advocates.
