So I know puppies bite and seen a lot of referring to 'the Crocopup phase', so how long generally does this phase last? Just thinking of my children
I think it depends on the dog, and also how effective you are at dealing with it. It's possible that with children around (who usually aren't as calm or consistent as adults) then it might take a bit longer than if only adults are interacting with the puppy. After the crocopup phase, some dogs turn into excitable teenagers, and nipping persists for quite a while, other dogs don't do this. My last pup stopped nipping at about 4 months, my current pup is much, much worse than he was and I should think it'll take a while longer because at 11 weeks she isn't even as good as my previous pup was at 8 weeks.
Molly is 20 weeks. The first 8 weeks we had her were pretty bitey but gradually got better. This last week she has turned into a clothes shredder.....
We got Xena at 7 weeks and were totally unprepared for the biting. But we (including my 8 year old) were super consistent with the yelp+stand up+ignore method and the biting dropped off dramatically. She's 11 weeks now and it's night and day compared with week 7, just normal bitey puppy. I'm not foolish enough to think we're out of the woods, but the yelp+stand+ignore seems very effective, as long as the whole family buys in.
Mine were both done by 14 weeks, but with a lot of training on Willow's part. She wasn't as bad as some stories by a long shot, but we still had plenty of bite marks and scratches on our arms for a few weeks. Shadow didn't come home until he was 14 weeks, and he never bit - although, without doing any bite inhibition training, he can nip my clothing (which sometimes catches skin) out of excitement, even now, at nearly 2. It definitely depends on the pup, but if you're pro-active about it, then it will help reduce the time it takes. I would be entirely consistent with both your puppy and your daughter that over-excitability on either side ends the game immediately.
It does depend on your pup. We were lucky - Pongo was brilliant, it only took him a few days to figure out that "biting when playing" resulted in being ignored. It took a bit longer for him to overcome his "excitement nipping" (that is, jumping up at people and nipping their clothes) but we got there after a few weeks. (I still have little puncture holes in my old jeans that are souvenirs of Pongo's puppy years!) Incidentally, we discovered "the towel game" - after walks we'd wrestle him with his old scruffy towel (gently!) to dry him off, and make sure we could shove a bit of it in his mouth so he bit the towel and not us. He loved that game and I'm sure it was part of his learning that some things are good to bite and some things - like his mum - are NOT.
Jake is 5 months and will still mouth (and occasionally get a tooth point scraping onto our hands) but will pretty much "leave" on command. "Drop" still requires a swap for something edible, so we ask him to leave hands and clothing and it tends to work. I think he more or less stopped croco pup stage just after 4 months - thank goodness. Although he still loves dressing gowns and will tug on sleeves and belts of those.
