Bringing Home a New Puppy: What You Need to Know

Are you about to join the other 48 million households that own a puppy?

If so, that’s extremely exciting! You are about to be a dog parent! However, there is also a lot of responsibility that comes with being a dog owner.

You need to think about the food you’ll feed it, the bathroom spot, when you have time for training, what you’ll name it, where you want it to sleep, and so much more.

Luckily, we’ve compiled some tips for dog owners in this article. If you are getting a puppy, keep reading! You’ll find this extremely helpful in the days and weeks to come!

Table of Contents

Get Toys and Food

When you are preparing to get a new puppy to bring home, you will want to do a few things before you go get the puppy.

It is best to have toys, treats, and food ready for it when they get to your home so that they have an easier time getting adjusted. Puppies also like to chew, so having something for it to chew on immediately will help it form chewing things that you don’t want it to gnaw on (like your furniture!).

When thinking about what food to get, you should ask the breeder or the rescue center from where you are getting the puppy to see what they are being introduced to. Keeping them on a consistent diet can be helpful. It is also a good idea to ask the vet that you will take them to as well!

Introduce Them to the Home

When you get your puppy, it is going to feel a little lost and confused as it is being taken away from its mother for the very first time.

It’s important to slowly introduce them to your home so they don’t feel overwhelmed with the entire space all at once. Start with one or two rooms and start adjusting your new puppy from there.

Most of the time, you should do this in the same spot where its food and water are. You can also choose to have this be where its crate is so that it recognizes the space when it is time for it to be crated at night as well – which may also be a foreign concept to the puppy.

Choose a Potty Spot

When you first bring your puppy home, you want to make sure that they know where they are going to go to the bathroom. This will help with puppy training.

The puppy will know what door to go to when they have to go to the bathroom. They will also know where in the yard you want them to go when you start using one specific spot with them.

If you are training in an apartment, you may also want to use puppy training pads. Making puppy training pads effective takes a little more work and training, so be sure that you read up on that first as well.

Keep an Eye on Your Puppy

Puppies are not like babies. Before babies can crawl, you know that wherever you leave them, they are going to stay. If you leave your puppy in one spot, it is not going to stay in that spot.

It will want to explore (many times by chewing) the space it has access to.

If you are moving rooms, make sure you are bringing the puppy to the other room with you.

Enforce the Rules

It can be exciting to bring home a new puppy and let it get away with everything at first because it’s cute and you want to give it time to adjust.

However, the puppy needs to start learning the rules from the very beginning. This structure will help it adjust quicker and be happier. If you don’t start disciplining from the beginning, it will only lead to confusion when you do start disciplining or rewarding specific behaviors.

However, when you are disciplining, remember that you simply need to redirect. Yelling or punishing a dog will only confuse and frighten them. In reality, they don’t actually know what you are saying to them, so your actions say a lot more to them as they learn what you are doing and saying through training.

Start Training

From the day you bring your new puppy home, you should start training.

You need to start training your pup where to go when it needs to go to the bathroom. You need to train it how to sit and stay so that it has discipline in its life.

To start, make sure you are simply rewarding all the good behaviors. This will reinforce it so that it starts to do this specific behavior more often.

Another tip is to make sure that you are taking things slow. Training for hours a day is not going to do any good – the dog will get bored and overwhelmed. It is best to start with a little bit of training for about 5 minutes at a time and work your way up from there.