Welcome to Happiness Unleashed with your host, Brittany Darren Bacher, presented by Live Happy.

You may have noticed that pets and children have a lot in common, and today's guest understands

just how similar they are.

When award-winning journalist and best-selling child development author, Wendy Lyons Sunshine,

adopted a difficult puppy, she found that traditional training methods just didn't work on her dog.

So she began applying the evidence-based parenting practices she wrote about and found this new approach was life-changing for both her and her dog.

In her latest book, Tender Pause, How Science-Based Parenting Can Transform Our Relationships with Dogs,

Wendy offers therapeutic concepts designed to meet each dog's needs. And in this episode, she tells us why

this approach is so effective. Let's have a listen. Hi, Wendy. Welcome to the show.

Great to be here, Brittany. Thanks so much for inviting me. I'm really excited about this conversation.

And I think any dog lover that's listening today is going to be super pumped to have this conversation too. And I think any dog lover that's listening today is going to be super pumped to have this

conversation too. And I thought it was so interesting because you're a journalist and a best-selling

author, but most of your writing and research is in parenting. So your new book, TenderPaws,

is on dogs. How did you make that shift?

What happened was the experience helping the parenting experts write books saved my bacon with

a puppy who was really more than I knew how to handle. And I was struggling mightily. The puppy guides were not giving me the answers.

They were talking about calm, you know, easy to handle creatures who were ready to learn things like sit.

And my puppy was acting like something shot out of a cannon and so,, and which many puppies are, but any case,

going back to the parenting books provided the inspiration and guidance that I really needed

to turn my relationship around. It had become too confrontational with the puppy, and I felt

we were going down a really bad path, and I didn't know what to do.

And turning to these particular parenting experts who'd worked with kids who came from really troubled backgrounds, what the author called hard places, like orphanages and child protective care and so forth, they really needed special extra attention and nurturing and

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