From Pets to Family Members - Rethinking Kinship and Care

Whether you are scrolling through social media or out for a walk in the park, you have probably come across dedicated dog parents sharing quality time with their beloved fur babies. At first glance, the daily routine of these pets resemble that of young children, combining play sessions, training lessons, comforting cuddles, and long nights of sleep on the parental bed. While some institutions, like military forces or guide dog schools, keep training dogs to perform specific tasks, the working dog population now represents a negligible proportion of the canine population. In other words, in post-industrial societies, the primary functions of dog-keeping seem to have moved from utilitarian to social. 

At the MTA-ELTE Lendület Momentum Companion Animal Research Group, led by Prof. Eniko Kubinyi, we aim to investigate how companion animals, especially dogs, are becoming increasingly important in the emotional lives of humans, exploring both the biological and cultural drivers of this shift. More precisely, we hypothesize that this shift is linked to the demographic movement observed in many regions across the world.

Not all cultures have developed equally strong emotional bonds with domestic dogs, nor do they regard them as “furry children” (Chira et al., 2023). The cultural runaway theory of dog-keeping (Kubinyi, 2025; Kubinyi & Turcsán, 2025) posits that, among other factors, declining fertility rates and their correlate, shrinking kinship networks, have led certain societies to culturally promote the integration of companion animals into intimate family circles. These new cultural norms may function as a coping strategy to alleviate a lack of social support that used to be provided by the community. Moreover, in a context where care has been highly institutionalised and raising children can be perceived as (too) costly, dog care might also constitute an easily accessible opportunity to express deeply ingrained caregiving impulses. 

Topál and colleagues (1998) were the first to show that dogs, when separated from their owners, display similar behaviours to those of children separated from their parents, suggesting the existence of an attachment bond between the two. Conversely, humans adopt specific caregiving strategies towards their dogs, also described as dog parenting styles (van Herwijnen et al., 2018). What is more, some of the biological foundations of parent-child relationships, such as oxytocin activation, have been observed in human-dog relationships as well.

Adapted tasks and paradigms traditionally used in developmental psychology revealed that many cognitive skills of adult dogs are roughly comparable to those of pre-verbal human children (Bensky et al., 2013), including, for instance, object permanence understanding and rudimentary counting abilities. They also excel at social communication with humans, showing remarkable emotional intelligence. Indeed, they can identify and react to the facial expressions of their owners, adjust their behaviour according to others’ attentional status, and relay what they want using simple forms of referential communication (Miklósi & Topál, 2013).

The physical appearance of dogs can accentuate their perceived cuteness and innocence, making them more attractive to the human eye. These irresistible canine traits usually match the “baby schema” as described by Lorenz (1943): large forehead, big eyes, small nose, round face. On a behavioural level, playfulness, sociability, and neophilia, may be also considered appealing paedomorphic features of the domestic dog. These descriptions especially fit small brachycephalic breeds, such as French bulldogs and Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, which have gained popularity in the last decade despite being prone to many health issues.

In most Western countries, dogs are not allowed to roam freely but rather remain under the responsibility and control of humans (Andersen et al., 2021). It is now common practice to keep dogs indoors, especially in large cities. Therefore, pet dogs depend on their owners for shelter, food, healthcare, physical activity, and social interactions – a condition that mirrors that of young children. For some, this dependency can raise challenges and concerns: Am I a good caregiver to my dog/child? What does my dog/child need to be happy?

Despite these many parallels, we claim that the dog-human relationship remains fundamentally different from the child-parent relationship. 

First, dog care is often perceived as requiring less long-term commitment, as dogs have a shorter lifespan than humans. Likewise, many people find it more flexible and less costly than raising a child, both in terms of money and time investments (Laurent-Simpson, 2017). The stakes are also not the same: while dogs will remain dependent on human care their whole lives, children are taught to become independent adults. 

It can also be argued that, in many individualistic cultures, the value of human life is still considered to be morally superior to that of non-human animals (Awad et al., 2018). In this context, only those dogs who fit the human expectations of a good companion may be considered worthy of care and love (Pallotta, 2019), leading others to be potentially abandoned or euthanized.

Although sharing evident similarities with child parenting, dog care constitutes an experience of its own. On the one hand, the human-dog relationship is intrinsically asymmetrical, as humans are the ones who voluntarily initiate and sustain it. On the other hand, one of the biggest benefits of this relationship is that it can take many shapes and forms. If, for some people, the dog is indeed a child substitute they can spoil, for others, it is a comforting friend, a trustworthy partner, a fun playmate, or even the most important individual in their lives. Its role can also change throughout a lifetime, sometimes leading dog parenting to coexist with child parenting.

More than just pets, but also more than just furry babies, dogs prove to be exceptionally adaptable to human needs. The way we consider them is highly dependent on socio-demographic and cultural contexts. In this sense, our canine companions hold up a mirror to ourselves and the society we live in. 

Read the article “Redefining Parenting and Family – The Child-Like Role of Dogs in Western Societies.” European Psychologist, 30(2), 2025.

Andersen, S. S., Meyer, I., Forkman, B., Nielsen, S. S., & Sandøe, P. (2021). Regulating Companion Dog Welfare: A Comparative Study of Legal Frameworks in Western Countries. Animals, 11(6), 1660.
doi.org/10.3390/ani11061660

Awad, E., Dsouza, S., Kim, R., Schulz, J., Henrich, J., Shariff, A., Bonnefon, J.-F., & Rahwan, I. (2018). The Moral Machine experiment. Nature, 563(7729), 59-64. 
doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0637-6

Bensky, M. K., Gosling, S. D., & Sinn, D. L. (2013). Chapter Five - The World from a Dog’s Point of View: A Review and Synthesis of Dog Cognition Research. In H. J. Brockmann, T. J. Roper, M. Naguib, J. C. Mitani, L. W. Simmons, & L. Barrett (Eds), Advances in the Study of Behavior (Vol. 45, pp. 209-406). Academic Press. 
doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-407186-5.00005-7

Chira, A. M., Kirby, K., Epperlein, T., & Bräuer, J. (2023). Function predicts how people treat their dogs in a global sample. Scientific Reports, 13(1), Article 1. 
doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-31938-5

Kubinyi, E. (2025). The Link Between Companion Dogs, Human Fertility Rates, and Social Networks. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 34(4), 232-239. 
doi.org/10.1177/09637214251318284

Kubinyi, E., & Turcsán, B. (2025). From kin to canines: Understanding modern dog keeping from both biological and cultural evolutionary perspectives. Biologia Futura, 76(2), 213-220. 
doi.org/10.1007/s42977-025-00264-4

Laurent-Simpson, A. (2017). “They Make Me Not Wanna Have a Child”: Effects of Companion Animals on Fertility Intentions of the Childfree. Sociological Inquiry, 87(4), 586-607. 
doi.org/10.1111/soin.12163

Lorenz, K. (1943). Die angeborenen Formen möglicher Erfahrung
[The innate forms of potential experience]. Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, 5(2), 235-409. 
doi.org/10.1111/j.1439-0310.1943.tb00655.x

Miklósi, Á., & Topál, J. (2013). What does it take to become ‘best friends’? Evolutionary changes in canine social competence. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 17(6), 287-294. 
doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2013.04.005

Pallotta, N. R. (2019). Chattel or Child: The Liminal Status of Companion Animals in Society and Law. Social Sciences, 8(5), 158. 
doi.org/10.3390/socsci8050158

Topál, J., Miklósi, Á., Csányi, V., & Dóka, A. (1998). Attachment behavior in dogs (Canis familiaris): A new application of Ainsworth’s (1969) Strange Situation Test. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 112(3), 219-229. 
doi.org/10.1037/0735-7036.112.3.219

van Herwijnen, I., van der Borg, J., Naguib, M., & Beerda, B. (2018). The existence of parenting styles in the owner-dog relationship. PLOS ONE, 13, e0193471. 
doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0193471