Behaving with Respect to Dogs: Children’s Mastered Dog-Safety Skills May Not Generalize Naturalistically

Abstract

Dog bites are a common danger to children. Behavioral safety training strategies are more effective than nonbehavioral strategies, but questions remain about whether learned responses generalize to new dogs and settings. Three preschool-aged girls who exhibited unsafe dog-greeting behavior during in situ assessments were taught to safely greet unfamiliar, leashed dogs using TAGteach™ ( TAGteach International, 2016 ). The children acquired the six-step behavior chain, but responding did not generalize to a novel dog, handler, and setting even after completing the training three times in progressively more-naturalistic settings. These results suggest a need to investigate effective strategies for teaching safety skills around dogs. They also question whether dog-safety training via online modules, classroom-based instruction, or video modeling is sufficient to improve young children’s behavior around dogs in natural settings.