Moms Talk: Kid-Friendly Pets

Each week the Mentor Patch Moms Council answers a question on parenthood posed to them by readers or another member of council.

This week's question: How do you pick a kid-friendly pet (whether it be a dog, cat, rabbit or gerbil?) If you have a pet, did you specifically set out to find one that played well with kids or did it come to some other way -- perhaps as a stray -- and it happened to work?

Melanie Majikas:

My husband and I have always owned cats but my older daughter fell in love with the Air Bud around age two.

They featured Golden Retrievers doing all sorts of sports tricks so she desperately wanted one. (That's really not the best way to choose a pet, as anyone who was a fan of 101 Dalmatians will tell you.)

But we researched the breed and found that it was a good one for kids, so we connected with a local rescue group (important to our family to do that and not buy from a breeder), and adopted a dog when the girls were 6 and 3.

We adopted a second dog the following year. I think the dogs add much happiness to our family life and I can't imagine not having them.

The cats might have a different opinion though.