The Only Parenting Trick You'll Ever Need: Have a Concerning Number of Pets

When my partner and I first moved in together in 2018, we had 1 cat each. But then they found a stray kitten that kept trying to run into the street, and they brought it home on a "temporary" basis. And then we met a vet asking for someone to take in a perfectly healthy 9 year old cat, because her family couldn't afford her bladder stone surgery and asked to euthanize her instead. (The vet did the surgery for free and then passed her along to us.) And then we walked into a cat cafe one day "just to look" and came home with another one. And then we found 4 more of them over the next year - all in various pitiful and precarious conditions.

So we ended up with 9 cats. And, during the monthlong government shutdown in 2019, a dog who is also basically a cat. Surprisingly, they all get along really well, and we take good care of them. It took us a while to realize that what we actually wanted was a baby - and after I got pregnant, we stopped adding any more. Towards the end of my pregnancy, I started to get really concerned about how we were going to manage 10 pets and a newborn baby, or whether having this many pets was going to put the baby at risk somehow. I definitely read too many Reddit posts about people having to give up their dogs after having a baby and worried about whether we'd have to do that too. In the end, we decided to cross that bridge when we came to it - we'd try our best to manage everything and rehome our pets only if it proved necessary.

It all worked out better than I ever could've hoped. Not only were we able to take care of the baby and all of the pets without much issue, having this many of them actually ended up making several parts of parenting a lot easier than they would've been otherwise. Here's why I think that every single parent, regardless of circumstance, should always have a double-digit number of pets.

Learning Care and Gentleness

Teaching a baby or toddler to be gentle is a Sisyphean task. It takes a while for babies to develop the hand-eye coordination they need to even begin to practice gentle touches. And toddlers get so excited about everything - it's too easy to forget the reminders they got 5 seconds ago. It's especially hard to teach this in the abstract. Why should they stop throwing toys around or bodyslamming everything in sight even though they really, really want to? Because it'll damage the walls? Toddlers do not give a shit about property values.

The easiest and quickest way I was able to introduce the concept of gentleness was by showing them how to pet the cats: how they need to move slowly and carefully, and why they can't give full-body-weight bear hugs even though they love the cats SO much. As babies, they started to understand the concept of gentle, open-hand petting by 4-6 months (with a lot of guidance and close supervision), which conveniently coincided with when they started to become more mobile. The cats were incredibly understanding about the whole process - they loved the babies so much, too!

As the kids grew a bit, it became possible to abstract the idea of gentleness more and more. We could point out that throwing something in a cat's direction could hurt them, and that was something the kids were able to grasp pretty intuitively. It was definitely a lot easier than explaining why/how not to damage objects - and it helped set us up for that conversation as well. Another abstract idea we were able to introduce was the concept of care - specifically, caring for creatures that depend on us for survival and who won't be able to reciprocate in any material way. It was really, really important to me to teach how to care for others openly and non-transactionally, and caring for our pets was a great way to put that into action.

Learning to Interpret Nonverbal Cues

Cats and dogs can communicate really well, especially once you understand how they do it. But many adults (even many pet owners!) don't bother to take the time and effort to understand them. But understanding the nuances of nonverbal cues (body language) is an important skill to learn. The cats are extraordinarily patient with the kids' antics, but if they hit their limit, they sometimes gently nip or swipe at the kids. Both of the kids get very offended at even the gentlest rebukes, but it's a great opportunity to sit down and talk to them about all the nonverbal signals that the cats were trying to send them before it got to that point: signals to look out for next time. Cats, unlike people, are very open about when something is bothering them - they don't participate in all the social complexities that make people hide how they're feeling. Learning cat signals also helps reinforce how to understand people signals, though. By the time the kids were a year old, they could understand that I'm in pain if I wince during rough play, and they're considerate enough to back off.

Our dog, however, is a total pushover. The most she'll do to reinforce her boundaries is to deploy a vicious kiss attack - or just plod over to the other side of the room. I still try to point out to the kids when she's looking nervous or uncomfortable. It takes more reinforcement on my part for them to remember to look out for those cues.

Learning About Chronic Illness and Death

Talking to kids about death is hard. It's hard for them to understand how and why it happens, especially when discussing it in an abstract way. Our cats are getting older, though, and several of them have developed chronic illnesses (diabetes, kidney disease, stomatitis, arthritis, heart disease, etc). It's been difficult and sad to deal with, but it's also created a space for deep conversations about illness and death. We talk about why and how the various illnesses develop, how we need to take care of the cats while they're sick, and what happens when they get too sick. We also emphasize the need for extra consideration around really old cats - we don't want to startle them or make them have to run away when it hurts to move.

Two of our cats have died in the last couple years. The first one, Bernie, died less than 2 weeks after I gave birth for the second time - at that point, both kids were too young to understand what happened. But when Pearl died a little over a month ago, I was able to talk to our older child A (then 3yo) about everything that was going on. I asked them whether they wanted to stay home from daycare on the day the vet would come to euthanize Pearl, and they said that they wanted to be there. So I talked A through every step of the process: that the vet would come, give Pearl 3 injections (sedative, anesthesia, pentobarbital), and then we would go bury her together. A spent hours cuddling with Pearl on her last day, loved on her through the whole injection process, and gave her flowers and trinkets when we buried her.

I was worried that the whole thing would be too much for A, but they took it in stride. At first, they wanted to talk through Pearl's death over and over - and more than once we spent a night crying together about how much we missed her. But little by little, they learned to cope with the loss. I'm sad that A and K will have to go through this at least 8 more times as they grow up, but they love our pets fiercely, and they understand that this is a part of love. I'm grateful for the opportunity to teach them this early on that death is natural, that we don't have to fear it, and that grief is an extension of love. That's not something that I'd be able to explain to them in the abstract - they can only really learn it by going through it.

I was never allowed to have pets as a kid. That didn't stop me from asking for a cat for every single birthday until I turned 18, and it didn't stop me from getting one as soon as I moved out of my parents' house. I wouldn't be the same person today if I didn't have a ridiculous number of pets. Every single one of them has such a unique and wonderful personality. I love them and have been changed by them deeply. What I didn't expect, though, is how much they'd teach our kids. Our children have been able to learn empathy, kindness, sacrifice, and gentleness - not because we as parents demanded it from them, but because they get to put those ideals into practice every day. Even conversations about aging and death, which can be so difficult and scary for kids, have become natural. My partner and I will always be crazy cat theys (as I like to say), and it's been incredible to watch how much our veritable colony of cats has helped our kids grow as well.