Do Pets Help with Stress and Anxiety?

Many people have fascination of keeping pets, with dogs and cats being the most preferred for the pet lovers. Pets make great companions, especially dogs are very loyal to their masters and safeguard their masters’ life and house at any cost. Pets keep you happy and uplift your mood. The same goes true for your children. Do you know what positive effects pets have on your children? Go through the article to know how pets can leave a good impact on your children’s mental health by helping them to de-stress.

How Do Pets Reduce Stress and Anxiety

Cheerful and loving pets keep your child away from anxiety. The findings have been published by the Centers for Disease Control and Protection.

Obesity and mental health are the major problems for children all over the world. The problem is more acute in wealthy countries. These problems can be nipped into the bud only with the adoption of an early approach. It has been already found that pets have good health benefits for adults. Apart from the adults, kids and children could also enjoy good physical and mental health due to the presence of pets at their homes.

Living with pets means increased physical activities for the kids (4-6 years), building a healthier body mass index for them. It helps them relax, which reduces and eventually eliminates their stress. Common people often fail to recognize – in fact, they don’t believe – that children too can suffer from stress and anxiety. It could be due to a deep sense of alienation, lack of peaceful ambience at home or other minor/serious reasons. Such children feel lonely from within and cannot mix up with others. They grow up selfish and cannot share anything with even their near and dear ones.

Mentally stressed-out children often fail to concentrate on their studies and fare miserably in exams. Pets are good friends to help children overcome their mental stress and lead a very normal life in true sense.

Pets and Kids’ Mental Health

• Pets can trigger conversation. Unfortunately, kids feel very alone in today’s nuclear families. With parents working, they don’t get much of time to interact with their dearest ones. That creates a sense of alienation for them, which could develop into a psychological problem of not being able to socialize. Having pets will produce an ice-breaking effect on the kids and better their emotional development.


• AAT or Animal Assisted Therapy helps in reduction of anxiety by alleviating feeling of separation anxiety. They increase a sense of attachment in children. All those good effects reduce development disorder in children.


• Pets help the kids to be in a cheerful mood always. Your kids will empathize more with others’ plight if they grow up with pets.


• Having pets at home also means that your kids will be more confident and have better self-esteem while growing up.


• Promoting emotional and behavioural competence in children is a preventive approach towards mental disorder in children. Pets provide good support to your kids in this regard.

Several kinds of research have been conducted with the help of empirical evidence to find out if pets have any positive link to improving BMI and reducing anxiety. In a recent study at the Bassett Medical Center, New York, the researchers have found that pet dogs are intimately linked to weight loss and mental well being among kids.

More researches are underway but it is an almost established fact that pets are good friends for both adults and kids. Pets leave fresh and positive thoughts on the mind and it is extremely important in the adolescent period.