Problems with housebreaking...any advice appreciated!

I have an 18 week old b/t male puppy. He comes to work with me & my other Cav during the day and is very well behaved there. I've had him about 6 weeks now.

However, when we get home his potty training skills go out the window! He literally pees on my living room rug at least once a day. Sometimes he does it after 30 minutes of peeing outside. I am beside myself. I also have a 2 YO son, and my mind is more focused on my son than my puppy when I'm home and that accounts for sometimes not taking him out as much as I do when we're at work.

However, shouldn't he be learning to hold it at this point? He holds it all night in his crate until 7:30am!

I think I'm a bad potty trainer, because my 5 YO tri female was 2 before she stopped having any accidents at all in the house. She's perfect now. Do Cavs just take longer to learn or mature than other dogs?

Everyone will probably say I need to crate him if I can't keep my eyes on him constantly, but I had this same problem with my female~ he HATES going in the crate during the day! I don't get it. At night, he has no problem and goes in by himself willingly. But he will scream and cry if I put him in during the day and my son runs in and opens the crate and then I just lose the battle.

HELP!

HELP!

Though I know this is frustrating, I think your main problem is not the puppy, but your expectations of what a puppy this young is capable of, and as you recognise yourself, that puppies are very difficult to manage alongside very young children (which is one reason I generally don't recommend people with really young families take on a puppy -- it is just a major challenge to try and manage both).

The second problem is that you are treating this very young puppy as if it is already housetrained (eg giving him way too much freedom). The puppy should never be able to have accidents inside because at this age, you need to be 100% vigilant and he needs to be at arm's reach *at all times* when not crated or asleep. Because he's now gone many times on your carpet, he has left his scent there and simply returns to what he thinks is the correct place to go so he is simply doing what is natural and seems right to him (we take advantage of this when we are housetraining, remember: part of the reason for taking a puppy back to a consistent 'right' place outside is that because he's gone there before, he will be spurred to go there again. You are probably doing this when you have him during the day. So at the house he is continuing that 'correct' training). To break this habit, you first need to clean all the spots with an enzymatic cleaner to remove the scent -- regular cleaners are not adequate (eg you can't smell the scent but his nose can). I'd also prevent him from even entering the area where he has gone before -- which means close some doors, limit his access (remember a puppy only gets housetrained a room at a time! You have to housetrain him to*every* separate room in the house). It is very common for puppies to go again inside even though they just went outside -- this is because he isn;t yet making the full connection that he needs to hold himself. On crate training -- you need to actually crate train the dog to accept and enjoy his crate before putting him into it -- there's advice on crate training in the Library section in Caring for your Cavalier and a lot of good links to explain how to do this correctly. Correct training before using crates for housetraining is important.

It takes up to a year for a cavalier to be more or less housetrained. Your puppy I am afraid is at the age when he is just STARTING to learn to be housetrained, so you have a good few months of vigilant work ahead and probably are going to need to manage him by crate training and also I'd suggest buying a x-pen so you can more easily manage a toddler and a puppy -- it is better to pop the pup into the xpen as you cannot leave him running around on his own without direct supervision, just as you can't leave a toddler running about naked on his own. If you do not have Shirlee Kalstone's book on houstraining I suggest ordering it immediately as this will be a huge help.

Good luck! Keep in mind it is going to take time and effort. Most dogs are not fully housetrained until close to age one, and most won;t be mostly there til 6-7 months or so, so you need to match your expectations to those limitations.

I'd suggest reading this thread from today:

http://board.cavaliertalk.com/showthread.php?t=22265

There are some useful links in it that I posted already on the same subject that should be of help.

chloe92us said:

He literally pees on my living room rug at least once a day.

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Have you cleaned the rug with something that will take the smell of the pee away--even if it doesn't smell to you it smells to him and he'll be drawn to the same spot.

chloe92us said:

Sometimes he does it after 30 minutes of peeing outside.

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Have you taken him to the vet to rule out a urinary tract infection?

chloe92us said:

Everyone will probably say I need to crate him if I can't keep my eyes on him constantly, but I had this same problem with my female~ he HATES going in the crate during the day! I don't get it. At night, he has no problem and goes in by himself willingly. But he will scream and cry if I put him in during the day and my son runs in and opens the crate and then I just lose the battle.

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I won't say that you need to crate him--I think that it's a myth that you need a crate to housetrain a dog--no one that I know has used a crate to housetrain their dog and I don't know any adult dogs that pee or poo indoors unless they're ill. If he hates going into the crate during the day, then I have to say that I think that it is unkind to force him to go in. Think of it this way--at night you lock the door of your house when you go to sleep and it's fine, but if someone were to lock you into your house and tell you that you couldn't leave, you wouldn't be so happy either--I'm with your son on this one. On the other hand, I do agree that you need to housetrain him one room at a time and fence off the room that he's in until he's learned.

Good luck.

Karlin said:

It takes up to a year for a cavalier to be more or less housetrained. Your puppy I am afraid is at the age when he is just STARTING to learn to be housetrained, so you have a good few months of vigilant work ahead and probably are going to need to manage him by crate training and also I'd suggest buying a x-pen so you can more easily manage a toddler and a puppy -- it is better to pop the pup into the xpen as you cannot leave him running around on his own without direct supervision, just as you can't leave a toddler running about naked on his own. If you do not have Shirlee Kalstone's book on houstraining I suggest ordering it immediately as this will be a huge help.

Good luck! Keep in mind it is going to take time and effort. Most dogs are not fully housetrained until close to age one, and most won;t be mostly there til 6-7 months or so, so you need to match your expectations to those limitations.

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Ditto what Karlin has said. Oakley is now 16 months and I don't fully trust him yet. He is fine during the day when he can get to his poochi bells but a night everyso often he will leave a message!

He tends to do this when either Joel or I have been away on business, I think he goes looking for one of us at night and gets distressed because he can't find one of us and poops because he is scared as he is fine when both of us are there ( or it may be that two of us squish him on the bed better!)