Service Dog Training Lecture Series – Selecting and Training Service Dogs for Children
This webinar on selecting and training service dogs for children will offer a look at the emerging field of service dogs for children with social and/or emotional challenges. Specifically we will cover how selection, raising, and training dogs for children differs from the process of selecting and preparing dogs to work with adults. North Star Foundation has been at the forefront of the movement to make service dogs available to children facing social and emotional challenges such as autism. We believe this evolving use of service dogs requires a different method of partnership, and that our North Star dogs can be seen as therapeutic tools for not just the child served, but to the child’s entire family, neighborhood and surrounding community.
Learning Objectives:
Participants will become familiar with the following:
- Breeding and selecting service dog candidates for children relies on specific canine qualities such as forgiveness, playfulness and social intelligence, along with a proper temperamental fit between pup and child.
- Public access challenges particular to children with service dogs.
- Advocating for service dogs for children with autism or anxiety to attend school with them to create an appropriate environment for learning
- There is no more powerful way to fight intolerance, prevent potential bullying and encourage pragmatic language than with a carefully bred, socialized and partnered service dog.
- Scientific studies that look at how dogs are helping children on the autism spectrum.
- How service dogs for children can be taught to recognize and alert to rising cortisol levels at times of high anxiety and be shaped into a therapeutic tool for the child at school as well as on the home front.
(We’ll be presenting Dan’s film JOEL’S HERO and speaking in first person about the experience of growing up with an autism assistance dogs.)
Speaker(s): Patty Dobbs Gross & Dan Gross
Cost: $25.00 USD
Speakers: Patty Dobbs Gross is the executive director of North Star Foundation, a 501 (c) 3 nonprofit organization she founded whose mission is to place high quality assistance and therapy dogs with children who face social and emotional challenges. Patty earned her BA from the University of Massachusetts in Psychology and her MA from the University of Connecticut in Educational Psychology; she is also the author of THE GOLDEN BRIDGE: A Guide to Assistance Dogs for Children Challenged by Autism or Other Developmental Disabilities (Purdue University Press, 2006).
Patty has been married for thirty-three years to a man on the autism spectrum, and she is the mother of four children who are all an integral part of North Star’s work. Over a quarter century ago her son Danny received an assistance dog named Madison from Canine Companions for Independence (CCI) to work with his challenges from autism, and from that experience, North Star was born. What Patty has learned about raising a child with a social/emotional challenge with the help of an assistance dog forms the very heart of North Star’s work.
That son, Dan Gross, recently graduated from USC’s prestigious School of Cinematic Arts with an MFA in filmmaking and has created North Star’s extensive video library. He is now working with as an editorial assistant in Connecticut and doing freelance film work in Los Angeles and New York City.
