The rights and wrongs of training your baby like a dog | Letters

Readers respond to Chitra Ramaswamy’s review of a Channel 4 programme that featured techniques to make children behave better

I was surprised at Chitra Ramaswamy’s strongly worded condemnation of C4’s Train Your Baby Like a Dog (G2, 21 August). Perhaps I’m naive, but I found Jo-Rosie Haffenden, the animal trainer, to be sensitive to the needs of these children and their parents, who were, like so many of us, unaware of their failure to meet their children’s basic needs for attention and safety. Many viewers would – I think – have learned a lot.

It seemed clear to me that Haffenden’s extensive experience with dogs made her highly sensitive to the animals’ basic needs, and that these translated naturally to humans. Why does it so offend Ramaswamy (and the others who wanted the show stopped before it went on air) to allow for the possibility that we humans might share common psychological traits with animals and that dog-training skills might be transferable to humans?

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from Children | The Guardian https://ift.tt/33RttCi