Dog to help with anxiety and confidence

My nearly 6 year old high functioning lovely son suffers with anxiety and lack of confidence.  We think a family dog coud really help.  We understand that the opportunity to get an assistance dog is extremely slim and we are not even trying to go down that road.  We have contacted a dog trainer who will assist when we find the right dog and we are prepared to find and pay for a dog ourselves.  The issue is that I like recue dogs as I think that breeding dogs is often irresponsible and no more than an opportunity to make cash.  However, we need the right dog.  Calm, gentle, willing to play and be trained.  Ideally we need a young dog.  We have started looking around the rescue centres where we live in Merseyside but we can't go on a waiting list so it's about touching lucky.  Any advice or shared experiences would be much appreciated.  Thanks, Tracy

Parents
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Reply
  • Dear all, 

    The moderators are here to ensure that all the members of the community are following the rules of the community, which can be found here:

    http://community.autism.org.uk/p/rules

    I would like to point out rule 4 - Be nice to one another and enjoy chatting with others. We encourage conversation and respectful debate; however, insulting posts or comments making personal jibes will not be tolerated.

    We do not always expect our members to agree with each other all of the time, so we would like to suggest having patience and understanding when both replying and reading posts, or to move on from a post that upsets you and concentrate on the original post. 

    Its great to see that this thread is back on topic. 

    Kind regards, 

    Holly (Moderator)

Children
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