The big news in the Wilkoff household is that Marilyn and I will be celebrating the arrival of a granddog into our nuclear family. Our younger daughter and her husband will be welcoming into their home a golden retriever puppy the first week in March. This may not seem like big news to some families and is certainly a step down on the priority list to the arrival of the four grandchildren that we already claim on our resume. But, you must understand that no one in our family has ever owned a dog.
Dr. William G. Wilkoff
Although my wife’s family had a dog, she apparently never really bonded with the canine. My pleas and occasional whining from our three children to get a dog were always met with my wife’s concerns about cleanliness and hygiene. We did have an antisocial cat who lived under a bed in the guest room or in the basement. His passing after 16 years when the kids were in college was not an event marked with any emotion beyond relief.
I think I harbored an unspoken concern about how I and our children might respond emotionally and psychologically to the inevitable death of what would likely have become our family’s best friend. Dispatching a belly-up goldfish after a month or two is small potatoes compared to putting down a tail-wagging, frisbee-catching, four-footed member of the family.
It turns out that my concerns about the mental health of our children may not have been unfounded. A recently published study from the Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital found that children who had experienced the death of a loved pet were more likely to exhibit symptoms of psychopathology than were those who had loved a pet who was still alive (Crawford et al. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2020 Sep 10. doi: 10.1007/s00787-020-01594-5). The observed effect of the loss was more pronounced in boys. There was also no statistical difference between the psychopathology symptoms of those children who had loved and lost and those children who had never loved a pet.
By the time I left for college I had grown up with five different dogs. I had endured the loss of sweet Mary, the boxer, when we moved to a small apartment and had to send her to a “farm.” I had watched 2-year-old Blackie experience a seizure that heralded his fatal bout with distemper. I shared the struggle with my parents as we made the decision to send my much loved inveterate car chasing “Butch” back to the pound.
However, I survived these losses and wonder whether they in some way prepared me for some of the emotional challenges that would come later in life. This study from Harvard sampled only children from birth to age 8 years. For those of us in primary care a more interesting study might be one that looked for any long-term associations between pet loss as a young child with adolescent and adult mental health. With the surge in pet ownership that has surfaced during the pandemic, there should be an abundance of clinical material to mine. The Harvard researchers’ findings should make us aware of the potential for psychopathology in a child who has suffered the loss of a pet. Each family must decide whether the plusses of pet ownership are worth the risk. However, I side with Tennyson who said it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
Dr. Wilkoff practiced primary care pediatrics in Brunswick, Maine for nearly 40 years. He has authored several books on behavioral pediatrics, including “How to Say No to Your Toddler.” Other than a Littman stethoscope he accepted as a first-year medical student in 1966, Dr. Wilkoff reports having nothing to disclose. Email him at pdnews@mdedge.com.