What parenting a twice-exceptional child taught me about dog behaviour — and why both worlds keep proving the same thing.
I know this moment. You've been putting in the work. Weeks, months, and then one day something finally clicks. Your child gets through a loud, chaotic birthday party without falling apart. Your dog walks right past the neighbour's reactive dog, calm as anything. You let out a breath you didn't realize you were holding. You think: okay. We're getting somewhere.
And then two days later, it's like it never happened.
Your child loses it over a cup being the wrong colour. Your dog loses his mind at a jogger he's seen a hundred times. Did we go backwards? Did I do something wrong? Are we starting over?
No. You're not starting over. And you didn't do anything wrong.
I've lived this in two very different worlds , as a parent and as a family dog mediator, and the thing both keep teaching me is the same: progress is not linear. Not for neurodivergent kids. Not for dogs. Not for any nervous system trying to navigate a world it wasn't built for.
Why we expect a straight line
We like linear progress because it's easy to track. You learn something, you remember it, you do it reliably. Done. But that model falls apart the moment a real nervous system is involved.
When my son was younger, I kept bumping into this. He'd manage something hard and then a week later it would be like the skill had vanished. What I eventually understood was that it hadn't vanished. It was still there. What wasn't there was the capacity to access it. He hadn't slept well. The school day had been relentlessly loud. There were things stacking up that I wasn't even tracking, and by the time we hit the moment that needed that skill, the tank was already empty.
I see this with my dogs too.
The stress bucket is always filling
In dog behaviour work, we talk a lot about cumulative stress — sometimes called the "stress bucket." The idea is simple: every experience adds something. A strange noise in the night. A new smell in the house. An unfamiliar dog barking from down the street. Even a small change in routine. None of these things might seem like much on their own, but they add up. And when the bucket gets full, capacity drops.
This is not a training problem. It's biology.
Dogs have a finite amount of cognitive and emotional bandwidth on any given day, just like we do. Poor sleep raises cortisol. Elevated cortisol makes impulse regulation harder and learning less effective. So a dog who seemed totally fine yesterday — relaxed on leash, unbothered by kids, responsive — might genuinely struggle today, not because they've forgotten anything, but because their bucket was already overflowing before you even clipped the leash.
Rosco is my clearest example of this. He's a reactive dog with a complicated start — medical issues in his first weeks, poor socialization, and genetics that lean hard toward vigilance. On a settled morning, after a calm decompression walk, he can pass things now that would have sent him over threshold six months ago. But if he had a rough night, or there's been noise in our building, or I'm tense and my body is saying so without my realizing it — he picks that up. His threshold shrinks. Same dog, same street, completely different result.
He hasn't forgotten anything. He just doesn't have the room for it today.
Something I had to learn the hard way, both as a parent and in this work, is that skills are context-dependent. They don't get installed once and work everywhere. They get learned in specific environments, with specific emotional states, with specific amounts of sleep and food and felt safety behind them.
My son learned to regulate in quiet spaces first. A calm room at home looked nothing like the cafeteria — loud, unpredictable, overwhelming. He wasn't less capable in noisy environments; he was still building that capacity for that context specifically. Once I stopped reading cafeteria meltdowns as failures and started reading them as information, everything shifted. He wasn't regressing. He was still learning, just in a harder setting.
Same with dogs. A dog with a solid recall in the backyard is not the same dog in a busy park. The park is a completely different sensory and emotional world. The skill has to be rebuilt there, with all of that context factored in. That takes time. It takes a nervous system that has enough left in the tank to actually learn.
When we forget this, we catastrophize. We decide the kid will never manage, or the dog is too far gone. Neither of those things is true. They just need more time in more contexts — and a support system that isn't expecting them to perform at their best when they're running on empty.
We have to always remember: a bad day is information, not a conclusion.
When my son was really struggling, I trained myself to ask a different question. Not "what did I do wrong" or "is he getting worse" — but "what's the load right now that I'm not seeing?" Is he getting sick? Did something happen at school that he doesn't have words for yet? Did a routine shift that seemed minor to me but registered as significant to his nervous system?
I ask the same questions now when a my dog or a client's dog has a hard session. Was there a vet visit this week? A new baby in the house? A shift in the guardian's schedule? Did the dog sleep badly because the neighbours had people over and there was noise until midnight?
These things count. They're not excuses — they're explanations. And when you have an explanation, you can respond with curiosity instead of frustration.
Rei, my Korean Village Dog, is generally the more settled dog, he's people-oriented, soft, very attuned to human connection. But even he has days where his on-leash reactivity flares in a way that feels like we've stepped back in time to his first weeks with me. On those days, I don't push. I don't increase the difficulty. I cut the walk short, I drop all expectations, and I spend the time giving him things that feel safe and easy. The next day, almost always, he's back.
If progress isn't linear then the way we respond to setbacks has to shift too. A few things that have helped me, in both worlds:
Stop measuring against the best day. The best day is not the baseline. The baseline is what your child or your dog can do on a regular, unremarkable Tuesday. That's what you build from. Expecting that peak performance every time sets everyone up to feel like they're failing.
When things get hard, reduce the ask before you increase it. A depleted nervous system does not learn well under pressure. It gets more stressed. The instinct to push harder when something falls apart is understandable, but it usually makes things worse. Pull back. Make it easier. Let the system recover.
Write down the good days, not just the bad ones. Progress gets invisible when you're only tracking the stumbles. I've had clients absolutely certain their dog was deteriorating but when we look at their notes together and realize that the hard days were actually spreading further and further apart. The wins were real. They just weren't getting recorded.
Make peace with the fact that there is no finish line. This was a hard one for me. With my son, with my dogs — this is ongoing. The goal was never to arrive somewhere. It's to keep building the relationship, keep adjusting to what they need, keep showing up differently as they grow and change. That's not a failure of the process. That's the whole point of it.
I didn't plan for these two parts of my life to keep talking to each other. But they do, constantly.
Whether it's my son or Rosco or a client's dog, what I keep coming back to is that nervous systems are not machines. They don't perform on command. They're shaped by genetics, by history, by what happened last Tuesday, by how much sleep was had, by whether the world felt safe that morning. Progress comes in waves. You get a stretch of good weeks and then a hard one. And then you look back and realize the hard ones don't hit as hard as they used to.
That's not going backwards. That's what moving forward actually looks like.
So the next time your dog reacts to something you thought was behind you, or your kid falls apart over something that seemed manageable last week — before you spiral — just pause and ask: what's the load today? What do they need from me right now, in this moment?
Probably not more pressure. Probably just more understanding.
____________________________________________________________________________________
If you're navigating a dog whose progress feels unpredictable, a Behavioural and Wellness Assessment can help you understand what's really driving the behaviour — and build a plan that meets your dog where they actually are.
Leave a Reply