Is my dog a replacement for human children?

Sean and I don’t plan on becoming parents—but not because we’ve decided to have a dog “instead” of a baby.

While we can draw helpful parallels between human children and dogs, neither of us feel caring for a pet is a direct replacement for parenting a kid. “Canine companion” and “human child” are two different roles to us! They certainly overlap in some ways—perhaps less or more for different people—but feel fundamentally separate in our own life.

Here’s more on why I personally don’t consider Scout to be a surrogate child.

(If you’d rather listen to some of these same thoughts or get extra context with tone and inflection, Sean and I also recorded a podcast episode about dogs and kids back in October. Give it a listen here!)

First things first: Dogs and humans are different species

Before diving in, I want to quickly address a common criticism of terms like “dog parent” and “fur kid” that is not the central focus of this article: unproductive anthropomorphism.

I’ve written about anthropomo…