When Should You Start Potty Training Your Puppy?

Potty training your puppy immediately after you bring them home, is the best way to ensure success. Typically, between the age of 3 to 3 1/2 weeks is the right time to begin working on puppy potty training due to the increase in mobility, and they begin to use the bathroom on their own without stimulation from the mother, but it’s not usually something a breeder will work on so it will be up to you.

If you are lucky enough to get a puppy from a breeder who did begin the training with your puppy, then finishing the job will be a much simpler endeavor. If you start training them when they are very young, they become aware that their fluids are disliked. Because of this dislike, they won’t want to pee or poop where they sleep or in their immediate living space, which makes it easier to train them.

Unfortunately, this early potty training is not that common among puppies. Part of this could be that owners don’t typically bring a puppy home until they are around 6 to 8 weeks of age. If the breeder was not concerned about training the puppies, your new addition may have developed bad habits and not realize that their fluids are unwanted, making them harder to potty train. Your potty training of your new puppy will go much smoother if your new puppy has had even the smallest amount of training.

Basically, you should start with the potty training the moment you arrive home with your new pup. Of course being in a new environment can be intimidating to a new puppy, and you don’t want to frighten them by reacting harshly if they potty in an unacceptable area, so it’s best to show them right from the start teaching them the place that is acceptable for them to go potty. Training them in this manner will serve two purposes.

First, it is clear from the beginning that there are designated areas for using the bathroom. Like children, puppies need repetition in order to grasp such concepts. Also, if you simply permit your new puppy to go anywhere then you are reinforcing bad habits and unwanted behavior. Of course this will then turn into a number of other issues that you will have to deal with down the road.

Teaching a puppy where not to go right from the start is without a doubt the best tactic for potty training, stopping any bad behavior right off the rip will help enforce the correct places for them to do their business. To avoid confusion, use the same approach throughout the potty training process. In order to train dogs, you but be consistent and repetitive. After you have chosen a potty training method, continue using that same method throughout the training process.

The potty training process can take a good bit of time, and much of this depends on how many bad behaviors he or she may already have, and whether or not the puppy was worked with before you brought it home. This is the reason it is imperative to begin training your puppy as soon as you can. By doing this, you should have a much less difficult time with potty training your puppies, and hopefully complete this task in a shorter amount of time.