🐾💕The Company of a Four Legged Friend🐾💕

Dogs meet our needs in so many ways—acting as our eyes, helping with livestock, locating bombs, or simply motivating us to get up off the couch.

Our attraction to these four-legged wonders reflects a host of practical, social, and emotional motivations

Research suggests that when other people in our life are not meeting our social and emotional attachment needs, we are apt to turn to dogs and other animals as a substitute.

Children characterized as being securely attached to their mother were found to be more well-adjusted psychologically and, at the same time, less likely to be attached to their dog. Researchers speculated that these children had less need for their dogs to compensate for their maternal attachment relationship deficiencies.

Pet dogs may serve as surrogate attachment figures for growing kids during the period when they naturally pull away from their parents.

Researchers found that “The more time spent with a pet, the more likely the adolescent played online games for leisure and browsed the Internet about animals. The more attached one was to a pet companion, the more likely an adolescent provided and received online social support.”

It's not just young children who become attached to a dog. Students bound for college can maintain deep feelings for them.

In a study from Washington State University, a quarter of students who left behind pet dogs to attend college reported moderate to severe pet-related separation anxiety.  The greater the students’ attachment to their pets compared to their attachment to other people, the more time they spent talking or sleeping with their pets, the more likely they were to experience anxiety over the separation.

Dogs and other pets often serve as substitutes for human social contact for individuals on the autistic spectrum, according to a study in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.

Dogs’ innate ability to provide social support can also benefit parents of children on the autistic spectrum.