That first week or so with an 8 week old puppy was spent mostly at home, building attentiveness to you, curiosity, intelligence, a keep at it attitude, and pre-socializing.
All of that will continue, too, long past the first few days. Now that new puppy needs to begin their socializing, and the baby steps of obedience training.
It’s a big new world they will be entering, and going from new puppy to competent service dog is a roughly 2 year journey. Your 8 wk old is now a 9 week old, and is still in a development period called “fear imprinting”. So planning and care is needed to ensure their social experiences and early training is happy and safe.
I usually include a couple 5 minute “training” sessions with a clicker, and a couple small outings at this point in our lives together. The socializing though, ie exposing them to sounds, textures, tastes, smells, and sights, is really the most important foundation.
Unless they become comfortable everywhere, they can’t concentrate enough to do what you are asking of them. And it’s a bit unreasonable to expect a curious, smart puppy to handle a shopping mall with a perfect heel and total concentration right off the bat!
I highly recommend a training plan. In fact I’ve written a page (to right) about it. Having a plan is extremely helpful in this early stage, both for you and the puppy. A smart trainer will set the goal to be the shopping mall, but split up the sights, sounds, smells of that mall and find other quieter and less busy places to introduce the puppy to.
It’s the same with the simple obedience training; split the behavior you want into parts, and reward each part they get right. Some puppies sit easily, some will not. Understanding how to train your pup with their own individual quirks can take some thought.
My next few posts and pages will go into alot more detail about socializing and clicker training, and will focus on a 9-16 week age window. There’s alot to cover there! And really the first 16 weeks is when a puppy’s personality and skill foundations are set pretty much for life. Putting the time and effort into the first 4 months of their lives has a huge effect on whether they succeed or not.
