Cats & Children
Written by Karen Lease on 21st May 1997
"Come on now we must go" were the mother words to her two young daughters. "The lady has work to do." These words I hear regularly as mothers and their children come and visit my cats and kittens looking for the perfect pet. The Birman and Burmese never mind all this attention and they know that I have nothing else to do with my days but play with them.
In a recent nationwide survey in America by the Ralston Purina Company the top 10 excuses by children for not performing their pet care duties as they promise so glibly to the breeder when the kitten was sold were as follows:
I forgot.
I’m too busy.
My stomach hurts.
It’s is not my job.
I have homework.
It takes too long.
I’ll throw up.
The cat is too big or small.
It’s is not my pet.
Do I have to?
It seems that children get off easy when it comes to pet care tasks. More than half of the adults surveyed said they’re responsible for caring for the family pet. Only 17 percent of parents said that their children was solely responsible for these tasks and 33 percent of parents said they shared the responsibilities with their children.
"It’s is unfortunate that three times as many parents said they take the individual responsibilities for the family pet over their children," Dr. Sylvia Rimm, a parenting experts. "Owning a pet can be a terrific learning and development experience for children at any age."
Dr. Rimm suggested that the way to get children to perform the care for the family pet is too established a schedule. This schedule should ensure that the animal’s pet care is performed before the children eat their own meal. If Fluffy, KoKo and Tabby must wait for their meal, then the child must wait also.
In hindsight this is easy for me to say. When I left the states for a working holiday in Australia over 25 years ago, I did advise my parents that they could look at my brown Burmese CoCo who was 13 years old at the time as she would only lived for another year or two. My parents agreed that it wouldn’t be fair to put her in 6 months quarantine for a 2 years working holiday. Little did they know that they had just agreed to mind my cat for another 10 years?