I've posted on this subreddit before about my youngest son and his anger issues (wasn't sure if I was allowed to post links to past posts) so long story short, my youngest son (9) is my step-son and has some anger issues from his birth mom's abuse. My middle son (11) has some medical problems and development problems. I also have an older son (15) who is very protective of his brothers.So a couple days ago a service dog site notified me that a dog was ready to begin training with a family. The dog was being trained for both epilepsy patients and children on the autism spectrum (both of which apply to my middle son). So I sat down with my husband to seriously discuss the option of getting a service dog for our middle son. We'd discussed it before but this was the first time a viable dog had been posted. We tried to do this while the children were playing in another room so they wouldn't get their hopes up. Unfortunately, our middle son must have heard because he ran and told his brothers in excitement. About 30 seconds later the youngest came running in saying "NO! You can't get a dog! I hate animals! I hate dogs and cats and everything!"Now we kinda knew this and was one of the reasons we'd never seriously talked about a service animal before. See, the youngest son lived with his mom and two uncles for the first 3 years of his life. They were very abusive and kept him locked in the house with very little outside contact. So when my husband was finally able to get him out of there, he'd never really interacted or experienced animals before. Like, you'd ask him what a cow says, or a cat, or a dog, and he'd have no idea what those animals even were. So he viewed them as something new and scary, and if they're scary then he wants nothing to do with them. We've been trying to work with him and so has his counselor but he still is not a fan of any type of animal, anything from a German shepherd to a squirrel has him scared and trying to avoid them. It also doesn't help that where we live tends to have a few alley cats and stray dogs which are never super friendly.So we tried to explain to him how this would be very helpful for his older brother but he wasn't having this. Meanwhile, of course, our middle and oldest came in and were also watching this going on. Eventually, the youngest shouted, "If you get a dog I'll let him out into the snow and he'll never come back cus he'll freeze!" Of course, this was really unsettling to hear from our nine year old. This also caused our middle child to start crying because he didn't want his future puppy to freeze. Then, as if this wasn't bad enough, our oldest child stepped in and started yelling at the youngest for upsetting the middle child. We eventually had to send the youngest to his room and comfort the middle child that no puppy was going to freeze. We reprimanded our youngest for saying such things about animals, but he insisted that he meant it. He tried to reason that dogs are dangerous and he doesn't want a dangerous dog around his middle brother, but he won't listen to reason.How do we go about getting him used to animals? We feel like we need to wait to get a service dog in order to sort this out but don't know when another dog with the right training will come along again. Our youngest son doesn't seem to see anything wrong with what he said which is, to say the least, worrisome since you always hear about kids who hate animals ending up to be serial killers and such (or maybe I'm just a worrier). Have you guys ever had a kid that didn't like animals? How'd you get around it or help them? Any suggestions are welcome and appreciated.Tl;dr: my youngest son hates animals and threatened that if we get our second son a much-needed service dog, he'd let it out into the snow and hope it gets lost and freezes. How do we explain to him that what he said is completely unreasonable? Or better yet, how do we slowly introduce him to animals and show him that they aren't all dangerous and mean? via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2FieZ2o
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