Recently I have been thinking a lot about resilience and how to best support it in our dogs.

And while ALL dogs benefit from a good, solid set of coping skills, I think it is especially the adolescent dogs, that are in dare need of them.

This is, of course, due to the peculiarities of this developmental time period: the adolescent brain rearranges in such a unique way that makes certain behaviors easier to emerge: seeking social contacts outside the family unit, exploring more, finding new resources, finding mates, engaging in risky behaviors, etc…

Those behaviors all serve their biological purpose, which mainly is: putting adolescents into direct and intense contact with the outside world. But this comes at a cost: adolescents are particularly vulnerable to painful experiences, stress and their long term consequences.

This places us guardians (and professionals) into a unique role of responsibility: How can we best protect adolescent dogs from those negative impacts without putting them into a protective shell that does not serve them on the long run?

Of course, some situations are just not adequate learning opportunities because they are too overwhelming. It is our job to identify and avoid those contexts.

And while management strategies will always be part of the solution, the biggest and most important part is building solid coping skills. This is also called resilience.

Resilience might be defined as the capacity to persevere, to adapt to, and recover from aversive experiences.

But what does this mean in practice?

It means that we need to build skills that support emotion regulation (persevere), foster behavioral flexibility (adapt), and create a solid sense of security (recover).

Framing resilience like that has helped me immensely understand what coping skills actually are, and how to work on them with our dogs.

Those of you who have done The Adolescent Brain course know that the lecture finishes with a part on resilience. However, I have felt since the beginning that this topic needed more exploration than I originally offered.

This is why I am particularly pleased to announce that the course is getting entirely revised, updated and relaunches in autumn 2026!!

The new version will include a substantial part dedicated to resilience including some very actionable steps.

The best part of it: It will relaunch at a fraction of the price it used to cost. If adolescence is a topic that you feel you need to understand better but for whatever reason you couldn’t enroll before, this is your moment.