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Pets

Whether your family has pets and who is responsible for them, from no pet to a family pet the adults care for to the child's own pet.

Should we get a pet for our child?

In short: Parents choose between 4 main approaches: No pet; Family pet, adults responsible; Shared duties; The child's pet, the child's job; keep an existing pet with supervision rules. Evidence: your call. No outcome evidence picks a winner. Preference, culture, money and logistics decide. Best settled: during pregnancy.

Evidence
Your call
Best settled
During pregnancy
Part of
The family system

Pets: what are the options?

Parents usually land on one of these 4 approaches.

  1. 1. No pet

    You do not have a pet.

  2. 2. Family pet, adults responsible

    You have a pet that the adults look after.

  3. 3. Shared duties

    Everyone has pet-care jobs.

  4. 4. The child's pet, the child's job; keep an existing pet with supervision rules

    The child is fully responsible for their pet. If you already have a pet, you keep it and set rules for it and the baby.

Pets: what does the evidence say?

Your call. No outcome evidence picks a winner. Preference, culture, money and logistics decide.

Allergy worries are mostly reassuring: a meta-analysis of more than 77,000 children in European cohorts found no overall link between early-life cat or dog ownership and asthma (JACI, 202200149-X/fulltext)), and a birth-cohort meta-analysis found a favorable association between dog or pet exposure and eczema (JACI, 201300600-3/fulltext)). The AAP's safety advice is to never leave a young child alone with an animal, since even friendly play can lead to a bite, and to teach children not to tease, kiss, wake or crowd pets. A systematic review reports links between pet ownership and emotional and social benefits, with the caveat that gains appear mainly when the child is attached to the pet and involved in its care (Purewal et al., 2017; full text not retrieved, so this is from the review's indexed summary)

Sources

What else is worth knowing?

A pet brings affection and work. Young children cannot reliably care for an animal, so the work falls on adults. If you already have a pet, pediatric advice is never to leave it alone with a baby.

Questions to ask each other

  • Do we want a pet, and who will actually care for it?
  • What would we do if our child loses interest?
  • How would we keep a pet we already have safe around a baby?

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First published 2026-10-03. Last updated 2026-10-05. General information, not medical advice.