By ALEX WILLIAMS
Today’s network lineup provides fewer idealized families and no shortage of questionable child-rearing role models.
It’s little wonder, then, that some parents, and even a few child therapists, are taking mental notes from a television personality known for inspiring discipline, order and devotion: Cesar Millan, otherwise known as the Dog Whisperer.
The suggestion that the Dog Whisperer is also a Child Whisperer of sorts has popped up in parents’ forums like blogs, online discussion boards, magazines and podcasts. Some parents are taking notice.
“When we started watching his shows, we had intended to apply his advice toward our dogs,” said Amy Twomey, a blogger on parenthood for The Dallas Morning News who is raising three children under 10 with her husband, Matt. “But we realized a lot of ideas can be used on our kids.”
Indeed, Mr. Millan’s advice has replaced a shelf of books on how to tame an unruly child. “It’s all the same simple concept: how to be the pack leader in your own house,” she said.
Certainly, experts on human parenthood long ago stumbled on Mr. Millan’s philosophical holy trinity - exercise, discipline and affection equals happiness. And Mr. Millan has never opined on how one should raise a creature with two legs in his show on the National Geographic Channel or in his four books.
But some parents say they find inspiration, and even practical advice, in Mr. Millan’s approach, which teaches pet owners how to become the alpha dogs by projecting his trademark “calm-assertive energy.”
Allison Pearson, author of the novel “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” which explored the stresses of motherhood, explained how parents would naturally envy the authority of dog trainers. “My generation got itself in a muddle about parenting,” she wrote by e-mail. “We thought that obedience was the enemy of love. We didn’t want the kids to be afraid of us, but after a while we found ourselves wondering: do we have to do what they say the whole time?”
Jenny Hope, a television producer in Los Angeles, not connected to the Millan show, applies Dog Whisperer lessons not just to the family dog, Heidi, but also to her son, Rowan, 3.
On the show, she said, Mr. Millan lets the dogs know that he decides when they can run off to sniff a juniper bush, and when to heel.
When her husband, Simon Cote, installed a sprinkler system in the backyard, Rowan wanted to play in the mud. She relented. Fun is crucial, after all. But so is an end to the fun. She let him make his mess, then brought him in after a set period of time. “It’s finite, and it’s what they crave,” Ms. Hope explained. “Children love structure, the same as animals love structure.”
Mr. Millan says parents question him all the time. “I’m going to give them my point of view ?I’m a father myself,” he said.
As a native of Mexico, he said, he adheres to a more traditional, hierarchical child-rearing philosophy, which he considers effective in both the pack and the family.
There, “for thousands of years, the elder has always been the pack leader, it’s never the child,” Mr. Millan said. “In America, kids have too many options when they only need one: ‘Just do it, because.’ ”
AMY DICKERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
MONICA ALMEIDA/THE NEW YORK TIMES
