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Answers to parenting questions

Question: My 2-year-old daughter keeps drinking out of our dog’s water bowl. Can she get sick from this? I am looking for ways to discourage this, but she seems to keep doing it. Now that the hot weather is here, I really don’t want to remove the bowl when we are at home. Any suggestions?

Answer: Your daughter can get sick from drinking from Spot’s water bowl, says Dr. Ronald Marino, associate chairman of the department of pediatrics at Winthrop-University Hospital in Mineola, N.Y. “Dogs can carry parasites and germs,” Marino says. “There is the possibility of infectious disease.” However, it’s not as likely if the dog is healthy, he says.

Your daughter also could experience gastrointestinal distress, says Kavita Seth, doctor of osteopathy at Huntington Hospital on Long Island, N.Y., and the director of the hospital’s Pediatric Hospitalist Program. That would be caused by bacteria in the dog’s bowl that may be deposited if your dog eats from his food bowl and then dips his face into the water for a drink, for instance. Partaking of the dog’s water bowl is just not hygienic, she says.

It’s important to ask yourself why your daughter is doing this.

Is she doing it to get your attention? In that case, you should ignore her when she does it, Marino advises. If the child goes to the dog’s bowl to drink, don’t yell, “Don’t go there!” Just calmly, quietly, remove the water bowl from her reach and offer your daughter a glass of water. “I would not use any words,” Marino says.

Make sure there’s no “secondary gain” for your daughter -- your attention, even if it’s negative attention -- from drinking out of the dog’s bowl, Marino says. Catch her “being good,” he says: Praise her when she drinks from a cup or asks for a glass of water instead of going for the dog’s bowl. Give her positive attention that way.

Is it possible you aren’t offering your daughter enough opportunities to quench a normal thirst? Does your daughter have free access to water and drinks during the day?

If so, can it be that your daughter has an abnormal level of thirst? In that case, this could be less of a behavioral issue and more of an indicator of a potential physical problem. Being extremely thirsty can be a symptom of diabetes, so you should have your daughter checked by her pediatrician, Marino says.

You really should try to find a creative way to put the bowl somewhere the dog can reach it but your daughter can’t, Marino says.

Christina Shusterich, president and owner of New York Clever K9 and a canine behavior specialist, suggests looking at online pet catalogs and purchasing a dog bowl that is configured like a water fountain. “The goal is to provide fresh water for the animal all the time,” she says. The configuration would keep the water fresh if your daughter tries to drink from it, and it might also make it less fun for her to drink from, Shusterich says.

Shusterich also says that if your dog is small enough, you should be able to purchase a gate to put around the bowl that would allow the dog to get inside but not your daughter. “There are 1,001 gate configurations now for dogs,” Shusterich says. One of them could work for you.

By Beth Whitehouse

(c) 2008, Newsday

Distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

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