Bring home a puppy and the next eight weeks decide a lot. The 8 to 16 week window is the socialization window. The habits a puppy picks up here stick for years. Skip it, and you spend the next two years trying to undo what could have been built in eight.
Foundations first, in this order.
1. Crate routine. 2. Potty schedule. 3. Name recognition and recall games. 4. Loose leash walking on a soft pace. 5. Place command. 6. Polite greetings.
None of these are dramatic. All of them compound.
Smart socialization, not chaos.
Socialization does not mean every puppy meets every dog. It means controlled, positive exposure to people, sounds, surfaces, and other dogs. The goal is a confident adult dog, not a brittle, over-reactive one.
Bite inhibition and chewing.
Both are normal. Both are addressable. There are real techniques for redirecting bite pressure and chew targets, and they work. If your puppy is biting and chewing, that is the program working as designed, not a sign something is wrong.
House manners early.
Solve jumping on guests at twelve weeks. Solve door bolting at twelve weeks. Solve counter surfing at twelve weeks. The same problems are an order of magnitude harder at fourteen months.
What our puppy classes look like.
Small group, 60-minute sessions, multi-week. The class works the foundations and gets puppies comfortable in a structured environment with other dogs and other handlers. Inside puppy classes.