I prefer parents and young children to be a little scared of dogs rather than to be blasé. Over 6 years old most (but not all) children will respect a dog if they are taught to do so. And I mean
taught with supervision and demonstration and experience and over a period of time not just being told something the first time the meet a dog and then expected to remember. I don't mean that families with young children/babies should never have dog but it does have to be handled carefully. I do think that in
almost all cases managing a situation or lifestyle with children and dogs is NOT about protecting the child from the dog but about protecting the dog from the child. There are exceptions where a dog attacks a child with no provocation but they are thankfully few and far between.
My relatives kids and regular visiting kids have been pretty good with dogs from a very young age (since crawling
) mostly because they are a bit scared as well as being taught to live with dogs. But like Tigerlily says kids under 8 NEVER look before they leap. These kids would never deliberately harm a dog but they might land on it in the middle of a crazy wall of death routine as they hurtle round the room so you can never just say "they'll be fine" and forget about them.
Kids do mangle training by wearing out certain cues particularly names and come, down, sit, drop, give, leave but that is as intrinsic a part of children as the inexhaustible "why?"
Dogcrazy and
Dogster - you could maybe use the children shouting your dogs names as a training opportunity. While they are shouting YOU say your dog's name and feed your dog a treat. It might just help with your recall with distractions.
One regular visiting child at age 2 DID go through a malicious stage where it deliberately nipped Zac's ears and poked him
but that stage disappeared within a few weeks. I've met the older poking-with-sticks-shoving-chairs-into-dogs kind of kids too (usually with parents who say "I think dogs make allowances for children" and do nothing to stop them
). I generally work on scaring and shaming the parents
but as Dogcrazy says... sometimes there is nothing you can do but RUN.