Hi everyone My boyfriend and I recently got a puppy, who is now 9 weeks old. We have only had him for a week. As far as puppies go, he is actually a good puppy. But the biggest issue we are having is crate training during the day and enforced naps. He has done fine throughout the night in the crate. However, during the day he just does not want to settle. He genuinely seems to enjoy the crate. We introduced it with a lot of positive reinforcement (i.e., giving him a lot of treats inside, feeding him his meals there, putting toys inside, rewarding him for going inside). He runs to his crate during meal time and sometimes plays in there on his own. But he will only sleep in there with the door closed if he is already almost asleep. If he is energetic, he will cry for a long time. Since we live in an apartment, we do not want to let him "cry it out", we would prefer to stop crying to begin with. We let him cry it out once for nearly half an hour with no signs of stopping. Sometimes during the day, he just does not know when to stop, which makes putting him in the crate to settle nearly impossible. Today, from 8:30am to 5:30pm he only got about 2 hours of sleep. He was obviously extremely tired, but he was overtired so he was basically the devil. He would lunge at our faces and bite at any chance he got, he wouldn't stop doing zoomies, and he was whining even though he wasn't in the crate. He was absolutely insane. He tried to have a nap in the afternoon, but it only lasted about an hour and he was VERY unsettled during it since he kept waking up and was moving around a lot (we have a camera where his crate is so can check in on him). He is asleep now, but that's only because we literally held him down until he calmed down. Then, when he realized he wanted to sleep, he walked into his crate willingly. But ideally, we don't want to restrain him every time before he calms down. Plus, who knows if it will work the next time. He was so overtired today he was acting nuts. He was actually really good yesterday and would have a 1.5 - 2 hour nap after every hour of play time. But today he has been insane! This happened a few days ago as well. When he is awake, we give him a lot of play time, he walks to his potty spot, and we give him a lot of mental stimulation (training). We also give him Kongs and stuffed toys, but they just make him more hyped-up. Any ideas of how to get an overtired puppy who doesn't know he's tired to calm down and go to sleep? Any ideas to get him to enjoy being in the crate when he is extremely hyped up / overtired?
Odin was a bit like this when he first came home. The world is a big and new and exciting place! We found that we were making the crate “too fun” - tonnes of toys and distractions! Now, he has two Kongs and water in his crate and the rest of his toys live in a toy box. He’s now 20 weeks old. He goes to his crate to sleep (and also sleeps on the sofa and on our bed etc if we allow it). If I say “bedtime”, he knows it’s time for a crate nap We use the crate when we cannot supervise him (if we go out or overnight or if we are in work meetings). Fortunately we both work from home so this is very workable for us.
Hi! I could have written your post WORD FOR WORD. I am going through the exact same thing right now - did you find anything that was helpful? Did it get better with time?
