Teaching Safe Dog-Greeting Skills with Parents and Children

Dog-bites pose a significant problem for children’s and dogs\u27 abilities to live an enhanced life. The majority of dog-bite incidents are to children between the ages of 5 and 9 years old and often dogs are euthanized for the crime (Wilson, Dwyer, & Bennett, 2003). There is limited research on a behavior analytic dog-bite prevention intervention that is both effective and generalizable to the natural environment. Yankelevitz et al. (2019) examined a six-step dog-greeting protocol to teach children how to greet unfamiliar dogs appropriately, but following acquisition the dog-greeting skills generalized poorly to the natural environment. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate if caregiver involvement when teaching children the same six dog-greeting steps would aid in the generalization of the skill to the natural environment. Mothers were trained using behavioral skills training (BST) and taught their children the six-step greeting protocol to mastery. Overall, all parents behavior met mastery criterion of 100% across all phases, despite one parent requiring a booster session. Parents also increased their child-dog supervision during both in-home and community observations compared to prior the intervention. Children met the mastery criterion of 80% for all phases and the rate and duration of unsafe dog approach behaviors both in the home and community observations decreased after intervention