With a name like Level Up Dog Training, you knew we’d start making nerdy video game references eventually, right?
But we’re also talking about puppy training!
Specifically, we’re going to talk about how a puppy’s critical socialization period works like a video game and why that matters to you, New Puppy Parent.
Why Socialization Is Like A Video Game
I like to think of the socialization period as a type of roleplaying video game.
For the first four months, you’re in the Easy Starter Training Area where you learn how the buttons work, what moves your character around, how to talk to non-player characters, where to get quests, what the point of the game is and the general layout of the map (where your PokéCenters are, or your checkpoints, or whatever the support structure is for that game).
Your primary job is to soak up all of the new information and build a mental framework for how the game is played.
In a good game, this area is made to be safe for brand new starter characters, so pretty much anything in there that you want to engage with, you can handle. You have “training wheels” on. The game is making all of the safety decisions for you while you figure out the game mechanics.
You’re pre-equipped with the right tools for the job. A tutorial (or friend) will show you what needs to happen next if you get stuck.
This is easy mode. It doesn’t take much work for you to develop your starter stats into a more well-rounded character and you’re at comparatively little risk because all of the monsters are puny. You don’t need to wonder whether this monster will aggro on you or whether you need to buff before battle or how many potions are in your inventory, because you are in the safe zone and everything is pretty much guaranteed to be non-lethal. You can focus on growing and learning the structure of the game.
Boot Up The Critical Socialization Period
Puppies have what we call the primary or critical socialization period. This is a developmental stage where they are primed to accept new experiences as normal or safe. It is basically the Easy Starter Training Area for dogs.
During this period, puppies are more likely to form positive or pleasantly-neutral associations with new things by default.
Everything is new and their concept of “normal” is pretty nebulous — after all, they only have a few weeks of information to draw from! This is biology’s tutorial mode to teach your puppy what is safe and normal for the rest of their life.
Within the primary socialization window, the optimism/pessimism scale is tipped heavily in your favor. If your puppy sees something new and it didn’t kill them or scare them, it’s likely to get filed under Probably Safe in their brain. They are significantly less likely to have an innate fear response to novelty.
Because the first three months are the period when sociability outweighs fear, this is the primary window of opportunity for puppies to adapt to new people, animals, and experiences. Incomplete or improper socialization during this important time can increase the risk of behavioral problems later in life, including fear, avoidance, and/or aggression.
The American Veterinary Society for Animal Behavior, Position Statement on Socialization
The more things you can allow your puppy to successfully file into the Probably Safe folder, the more comfortable they are likely to be when interacting with novelty later in life.
To massively over-simplify, the proportion of Probably Safe stuff to Probably Scary stuff filed in your dog’s brain at the end of their socialization period is going to give you a rough idea of how your dog copes with new stuff as an adult and which folder Random Unknown Thing #28198 is most likely to get filed into.
So there is a snowballing effect: the more things in the Probably Safe folder already, the more likely it is that some new thing will also be sorted into the Probably Safe folder in the future. You’re not just teaching them to be okay with strollers, vacuum cleaners or the noise the smoke detector makes in the kitchen on their own merit — you’re building the framework for how they respond to new things in general too.
You want to stack the deck in favor of Probably Safe as much as you possibly can, as early in life as you possibly can. Working within the critical socialization period gives you a big boost and makes this job drastically easier.
Different experts have different models on when this window opens and closes, but a general consensus is that it opens somewhere around 3 weeks of age and closes somewhere between 12 and 16 weeks. Which means that even in the best case scenario, you’re looking at a short four month window to manually install optimism for the rest of their life — and they’ve spent at least half of that time with their litter before coming home to you.
These few short months control your dog’s parameters for what “normal” looks like for the rest of their life.
Take advantage of this!
Ivy-Rue is filing “sometimes water has moving fish in it” under Probably Safe.
Leaving The Easy Starter Training Area
Eventually, you leave the Easy Starter Training Area and enter the actual game.
As soon as you exit the starter area, you abruptly lose all of those benefits.
Safety isn’t the default assumption anymore. Now there are monsters around that absolutely can pwn your newbie butt. It’s prudent to think about your likelihood of success before taking on any new battles. Discretion becomes the better part of valor.
Suddenly, you don’t get the newbie experience multiplier anymore. If you want to level up, you have to really work for it.
Your checkpoints are spread out a bit and you need to keep an eye on the number of healing potions in your inventory. Your safety net is a lot less accessible than it used to be.
And instead of being sheltered in the safety of the newbie area, you’re dumped into the full game with a much wider range of options available. Now you’re sent out into the wide world with less concrete direction as to what you’re supposed to be doing, which means your capacity to make dangerous mistakes is much higher.
Gulp.
Hope you payed attention in the tutorial.
Now Leaving Socialization Station
With most dogs, the primary socialization period closes somewhere between 12-16 weeks of age. The actual numbers vary depending on the dog, the circumstances and which expert you’re asking, but it’s somewhere in that range.
At this stage in development, feral puppies are starting to roam further from their mothers and develop their independent foraging and exploration behaviors. They’re not nursing anymore and while they’re still getting social benefits from being around other dogs, they’re not dependent on their litter either.
They’re young, they’re inexperienced, they’re still socially and sexually immature, but they can feed themselves and find shelter.
Since they’re making more independent choices and straying further from the relative safety of the litter (and their mother’s good judgment), their safety becomes their own responsibility. And they are working with really limited information in that department. At the same time, their exposure to danger is increasing because they’re exploring their environment and experimenting more with new behaviors.
And when you’re inexperienced and independent at the same time, it pays to be cautious about new things as a default setting.
Things that they filed under Probably Safe during the socialization period get grandfathered in as “normal,” but new things are more likely to be regarded with caution or outright suspicion. You can think of it as Douglas Adams’s Law adapted for puppies.
I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Douglas Adams, author
Here There Be Dragons
If you’ve been in the Easy Starter Training Area of the video game where all of the monsters have looked like little squishy blobs with cute faces, but now you’re in the main game and a dragon with sixteen heads is rushing toward you, you probably aren’t going to attack it with the same confidence that you would engage that walking-stuffed-animal starter monster. It is entirely outside of your current experience, and also it is a dragon.
You don’t get to depend on the video game’s parameters to make choices about what is safe or unsafe anymore. Learning that something is categorically safe is a much more guarded experience. If you don’t have a good sense of whether a situation is safe, it pays to assume that any new monster can probably eat you until (A) you see conclusive proof that it can’t or (B) you’re forced to test it.
While you’re learning to navigate the world more fluidly and you’re starting to unlock interesting advanced game-play options, you’re also simultaneously realizing that it wouldn’t take much for you to end up as a smear of pixels on someone else’s screen with a big “YOU LOSE” text banner above it. You have more capacity to play and make decisions, but the stakes just keep getting higher and you have to work harder to achieve the same gains.
You’ve Earned 42 EXP. Only 1,667 More Until You Level Up
In the Easy Starter Training Area, you can earn a relatively large amount of experience for slaying measly weak little monsters which will be laughably tiny once your character levels up a bit — but because you’re so new, literally any experience is a lot of experience, so these little wins go a very, very long way. You can level up rapidly on relatively small successes. You have a hefty experience multiplier.
Over time, your experience bar becomes larger, but also drastically slower to fill up. It takes way more successful battles to feel like you’re making significant progress. You have to do more work for relatively smaller gains.
Puppies are sponges. They soak up new information in a really remarkable way and it takes very little neutral exposure to convince a young puppy that something is normal because they have nothing to compare it to, because they are infants. They have to assume that new things are normal because they don’t have enough information to build a functional normalcy-filter yet.
At the risk of getting up on my soapbox, I feel like people often overlook how incredibly young their puppies are. Yes, dog-infants develop much faster than people-infants, but you’re still working with an animal that was born less than four months ago. The sheer amount of new-ness that they have to sort through in those first few months is astronomical, and people rarely notice how much novelty we barrage our puppies with until something goes wrong.
As their primary socialization window closes, so does that rapidfire classification of safe/unsafe. Instead of happening automatically in the background, you enter the zone of “Explain that again, but slowly.”
Novelty? I don’t know how to handle this!
The Parable of the Mailbox
During the critical socialization period, maybe they only needed to see one mailbox to think, “Have seen a mailbox, checked it out, didn’t die,” mentally check it off on their Probably Safe list and accept all mailboxes as normal.
After their socialization window closes (and especially if they didn’t get a lot of things filed under Probably Safe during that time, or if they have a lot of things filed under Probably Scary), maybe they need to see ten or twenty different mailboxes from a distance and investigate them thoroughly with suspicion before deciding that mailboxes are allowed to exist.
Or maybe you need to actively train them to be comfortable with the existence of mailboxes because they’re truly distressed by seeing them and need an unreasonable amount of distance from mailboxes to feel secure.
You can laugh at the example, but the mailbox-dog was a real dog and they were genuinely terrified. And because they came to me after the primary socialization window had closed, we had to spend a decent chunk of training time painstakingly convincing this dog that all mailboxes should be filed in Probably Safe, not Probably Scary. Not just this mailbox on this day, but all mailboxes on all days no matter what.
The Rat Is Always Right
In animal training, we have an adage that “the rat is always right,” which means that regardless of your intentions or beliefs, the learner’s behavior tells you what they are experiencing. If you think that you’re reinforcing your dog but the target behavior isn’t increasing or maintaining, then your dog’s behavior is showing you that, by definition, reinforcement is not occurring.
In this case, the fact that it’s an absurd fear to us humans doesn’t make it any less scary for them.
If you’re approaching your dog’s fear from the point of view of “just” (as in “it’s JUST a mailbox” or “why can’t you JUST walk past it” or “I don’t understand why you can’t JUST get over it”), you’re not listening to what your rat is telling you.
If your dog is scared of a mailbox, then mailboxes are scary for them — regardless of your knowledge of the general behavior of mailboxes (or lack thereof).
A Note On Domestication And “Getting Over It”
It’s worth noting that developmental milestones pretty much don’t care that your dog is a domesticated pet who has lived in the lap of luxury since the day they came home and the most “hunting” they do is finding the tennis ball that rolled under the sofa last week.
They also don’t care that your neighbor’s new mailbox is very unlikely to jump out and murder your puppy.
You get to influence your puppy’s reactions by giving them a lot of safe novelty during the socialization period when they are primed to accept new things easily, which will give them a template for how to approach novelty later in life (goal: manually overriding biology’s prompting to be suspicious of change). You can support your dog if they’re worried about something and give them more space to deal with it from a safer distance where they feel more secure. You can use desensitization and counter-conditioning to teach them to be more comfortable with what scares them.
What you don’t get to do is scoff “Well, everyone knows mailboxes aren’t scary!” and ignore the fact that nonetheless, your puppy is scared right now at the end of your leash.
At this point, “showing them it’s not really scary” is an excellent way to accidentally make the fear worse by repeatedly pushing them over their fear threshold. Mere exposure to something they have already filed as Probably Scary to “help them get used to it” is very likely to backfire, even if your intentions are good.
That is not socialization. If your dog is over four months of age, you are not “socializing” them; that ship has sailed and the developmental stage has ended. And if you’re trying to socialize your already-fearful dog, what you’re probably doing is flooding (usually unintentionally), a risky method with the potential for some surprisingly unpleasant side-effects.
Once your puppy/dog is showing overt fear of something, your goal shifts from socialization to desensitization/counter-conditioning, ideally under the guidance of a trainer.
The short version: If you want to use mere exposure to teach a dog that the world is safe, plan to start early. If you don’t plan to start early, then plan to work much harder for it. It’s as simple as that.
Taking Advantage Of The Starter Zone
But when your puppy is very young, everything is new and everything is assumed to be safe and good and approachable until proven otherwise. You have the temporary advantage of starting at neutral.
There are some puppies who are naturally bold and some who are naturally hesitant, but even within that range, you still have the benefit of a sort of “experience multiplier” effect during the socialization window. Even that super fearful puppy is still learning much more about things that are good/neutral than the equivalently fearful dog will be learning in a few months with a similar level of training intervention.
And that matters.
That means that if you want to level up as fast as you can and as safely as you can, if you want your brand new puppy to grow into the most stable dog they can be, then you want to get the absolute most mileage out of that protected tutorial area as you possible can. In video game terms, you want to grind the low-level, low-experience, low-risk monsters for as long as you can stand to, as thoroughly as you can stand to, because that is what is going to allow you to build the most stable character later in the game when their stats really matter — and you won’t necessarily see the relevant stats until the newbie multiplier is long gone.
Even if you think your puppy is perfectly confident, it pays to be very thorough with your socialization efforts.
The Benefit of the Doubt
When your puppy is under 16 weeks old, you have the benefit of the doubt. If you can just make it neutral during that time period, that will typically get rounded up to good or safe. When the socialization period closes, you lose the benefit of the doubt and it takes much more active work to move something from unsafe to neutral, or from neutral/unknown to safe.
The point of the Easy Starter Training Area is to teach them the game so that when you get to the adult version of your dog, they know how the buttons work and they know the difference between the easy monster they can walk right past and the dragon that will eat them from halfway across the map.
The goal of socialization isn’t to spend time with other dogs or be smothered by other people or to spend their puppyhood romping at the dog park and forming good-old-days memories that their future doggy self will look back on with nostalgia and joy.
The point of the socialization period is to install the parameters for what safe/normal looks like and what is genuinely threatening. People and dogs are on that list, but so are mailboxes and tile floor and vacuum cleaners and walking in the rain.
The Bottom Line on Socialization as Video Game
Teach your puppy how to navigate their unfamiliar and often threatening environment, which battles to choose and which are beyond their skill set.
Stretch their skills gradually and always keep the Help menu open so that if they need more guidance than they’re getting, they can reach out to you for clarification.
Focus on teaching them how to make appropriate decisions for themselves and how to get comfortable with the mechanics of the world.
And take advantage of the experience multiplier while you’ve got it, because it doesn’t last long.
Socialization is the training area of a video game. Be a good tutorial.
Ready to Level Up Your Puppy’s Socialization?
If you wish your puppy’s primary socialization period came with an instruction manual, we’re here to help!
All of Level Up Dog Training’s puppy programs are built with a focus on positive reinforcement and early socialization. We work on obedience skills like sit, leave it, come when called and walking politely on a leash, as well as lifestyle skills like potty training, greeting without jumping, playing without biting, crate training, chewing and more.
If you’re near Jacksonville, NC, let’s chat! We would love to develop the potential of your superstar puppy, teach your pup how to live politely with humans or just help you survive puppyhood with your sanity intact.
And did we mention that the initial consultation is free?
