I don't think many parenting tips or guides ever speak in terms of training or god forbid compare and contrast with animal training. They should, as in many re

I don't think many parenting tips or guides ever speak in terms of training or god forbid compare and contrast with animal training. They should, as in many respects we're not so different. So many parents end up accidentally training their children into bad habits, whilst trying to be a good parent. A really simple and obvious example is "how to teach your kids to whinge". Go shopping. Tell kid no chocolate. Kid whinges a bit. Mum keeps telling kid "no choc, now stop whining". "behave nicely". "do you want me to tell dad?" "do you want to go sit in the car?", and on. Eventually mum has had enough "OK here, now be quiet" and hands child the smallest item on the shelf. Well done, you've reinforced that kids need to be really persistent in their whinging for it to work. Cool, they can do that. I will say it's a lot harder to successfully apply with kids than with animals, especially the alien species known as the teen. But it can, and does, work and was very helpful. The difficulty for me was knowing how to apply the principles to a particular human situation. Simple stuff like flush the toilet after use, easy. Complex inter-sibling stuff, not so much. Probably room for quite a few books and guides there. :) As for animals, I credit dogs with far more intelligence than is commonly believed. Clicker training really does allow them to demonstrate using their brain. Pausing to think, experimenting with different random actions to see what gets the click, the happiness when they think they've "got it". You can train most dog actions in a single 5-10 minute session each. Reinforce it a few times over the week. Done. I'm amazed any other animal training method still survives, especially as the dogs seem to thrive and become more interactive and less of just a dumb pet. None of the bullshit of showing you're the alpha pack leader, or shock collars, or slowly dominating a dog into compliance. I completely agree that this topic should be taught to everyone in school, and in parenting classes. It's a fascinating field.