It’s common for people to add a new family member at Christmas: a puppy or dog. The first year my family moved to North Carolina we adopted Hayley in December shortly before Christmas. She was an adolescent at the time. There’s something special about getting a new dog for Christmas, probably because receiving a pup is a special gift.

If you fall into this wonderful category of new dog guardian, now is the time to set your puppy (or new dog) up for success. The first priority for puppies is socialization - getting them used to new things and events that they will need to be comfortable with during their lifetimes, including socializing to new people, other dogs and pets, different outside environments, locations, and surfaces (sidewalks, woods, steps, ramps, etc.), gentle body handling and veterinary procedures, etc.

The most important factor in socialization is helping puppies learn all of these new things/events predict positive outcomes for them, and not negative or scary or uncomfortable things. This means just exposing them to things doesn’t guarantee they will get used to them. It’s possible to expose a puppy to something new but in a way that unfortunately or accidentally scares them, and results in a negative rather than positive association.

How will you know if you’re socializing your puppy properly? You can start to learn to read dog body language and behavior, allowing you to observe if something is scaring your puppy or not. Part of this requires watching your puppy to see any changes in behavior or body language like facial expressions, ear or tail positions, and so on.

In addition, since we know most of the things we want to help puppies become comfortable with, we can specifically target them and create positive associations with them - for example, if we want a puppy to socialize to new people, we can simply have those people feed some high value/tasty treats to the puppy until they bond.

The good news with young puppies is if they accidentally get pushed too far and scared of something, we can quickly expose them to it again and intentionally pair it with treats to create a positive association. This is due to puppies’ extreme malleability during their puppy socialization period. In contrast, with adult dogs if they are already scared of something, we may have to work at a slower, more gradual pace to change their emotional state.

If you have time, you can start working on socialization and training new obedience/foundation behaviors like sit, stay, come when called - but the priority during the socialization period should be socializing/creating positive associations and experiences with new things. Other behaviors can be taught at any canine age over time.