Question: do you have a partner who is resistant to bringing a pet into your home? If so, does he or she use your child as an excuse for keeping a fur baby out of the picture?

Ok, we can practically see you shaking your head right now. It’s an aggravating issue—and an especially heartbreaking one for animal lovers.

We, too, have been through this very same scenario and, lucky for us, we’ve come out victorious, with dog IN house.

(hold for applause)

Now, no matter how much we’d love to take this time to brag about our stellar negotiating skills, we would be lying if we said that our signature mixture of charm, guilt-tripping, and tempting our partner with baked goods helped us win this fight. It didn’t.

The one thing that DID, however, was our stellar researching skills. Yep, we put our English degree to good use and dug into the annals of the Internet to find as much credible evidence we could get our hands on that proved our important theory—that pets are good for kids.

Here’s what we found:

An article by Hal Herzog, Ph.D. published in Psychology Today points to a whopping 22 studies that show quite a whole lot about what happens to kids when they grow up with a pet. Though some benefits are on the hazier end, many psychologists feel that pets—no matter if they’re furry, scaly, slimy, or slobbery—are great for little ones.

In fact, the researchers found that children who are currently growing up with animals in their home could be stronger than their pet-less peers in three important ways: 1) their self-esteem may be higher, 2) they might be further along in their cognitive development, and 3) their social skills are likely A+. Who doesn’t want their kid to excel in those areas?

So, we’re pretty much just going to skip over the most obvious benefits of having pets in a house; we all know they teach responsibility and offer friendship, (but there are studies to back up those sentiments, too, if you’d like to peruse them!).

The most revelatory nugget of information that we got from this quest was that children who grow up with furry animals in the home—i.e. dogs, cats, bunnies, chinchillas, etc.—are less likely to develop allergies. It sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true!

A study conducted by Dennis Ownby, M.D., with the Medical College of Georgia, found that children who lived with two or more dogs from infancy had fewer allergies by the age of seven than their sneezing buds. In fact, these kiddos were less than half as likely to develop them when compared with the average. It could even decrease a child’s risk of developing asthma!

Wow. Just, wow.

Yep, we were pretty impressed by our findings, too! Pro tip: e-mail this post to your stubborn partner with this subject line— ‘You can’t argue with science…”

Trust us, it will work.

BUT, if it doesn’t, just show them the video below for a cuteness overload that they won’t be able to argue with. Once they see how magical the relationship between kids and pets can be, your family will be adopting your own in no time!

We’d love to hear what you think about the effect that pets have on children. Do you agree with the research? If not, why? How have your pets helped your kids?

Sources: Parents

Psychology Today