In the past week, I’ve visited a score of dog breeder, shelter and rescue sites I found what I suspected, that all but one refused to sell or release a dog to a household with young children, especially those under 10 years of age. Several of the sites even demanded the dog-seeker pledge not to have a child within five years of buying or adopting a dog.

First, this struck me as simple bigotry. If we can’t ban or demonize one group, let’s find another, it seems to be human nature. Secondly, it struck me as tragic, both for dogs and children, yet another  thoughtless way of harming dogs in the name of protecting them.

And it almost certainly harms children, something that should outrage people who care about animals and people.

“Dogs will not be adopted to families with children under 10,” says the website of a Northeast dog rescue group, “nor to those planning on having children within five years,. Adoptions to families with children 10 and over will be evaluated individually, with the needs of the child and dog taken into consideration.“

A conscientious breeder who sells dogs for $2,000 put this on her site: “People with young children will have their applications for my dog rejected automatically.”

I was shocked to read this when I first saw it, and then realized it is almost standard for breeders and rescue groups. Every time I think we have given up on the idea of demonizing or stereotyping whole groups of people, I learn that I am being naive. And even though we loudly proclaim our love of animals like dogs, we seem to have little understanding of just how valuable and necessary they can be to us and our children.

There is a vast trove of literature and many studies detailing the enormous benefits to children of growing up with dogs, and the even greater benefits to dogs.  Millions of dogs need homes, and almost every child needs a dog. What a profoundly sad disconnect.

Why children should be banned from this increasingly healthy and necessary social support is simply beyond me, I can’t understand it in any other way than seeing instinctive bigotry and discrimination.

The social crises afflicting our urban and suburban societies are taking a toll on emotional distress. There are ongoing massive migrations and population shifts from rural America to the West, Northeast and Southern United States. Many families have no reliable or continuous ties to the communities in which they now live. New technologies, advertised as new sharing communities, separate us from one another, and actually divide us.

Parents and children once lived circumscribed and communal lives, sharing the same activities, faith point of view, faith, even work. The child was an economic unit with everyone participating. Life and death were shared experiences out in the open.  Grandma died at home.

Children are no longer needed or even permitted to care for the physical upkeep of their homes. Now children read, learn, entertain themselves and live out their social lives on electronic devices which promote stress, cruelty and isolation. Parents are willing, often eager,  enablers of this.

In his ground-breaking book “Pets And Human Development, ” psychologist   Boris Levinson wrote about the confusion and alienation in the lives of modern children. “It should not surprise us that an estimated 10,000,000 people under the age of twenty-five are in need of help from mental health workers.” In 1966, he wrote,  1,400,000 children under the age of eighteen needed psychiatric care.”

Today, according to federal health studies, an estimated 15 million young people can currently be diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Many more, say researchers, are at risk of developing a disorder due to risk factors in their biology or genetics, within their families, schools, and communities.

Dogs could help.

Researchers have found that pets radically improve the mental health and development of children.

Numerous studies, reported Levinson a half-century ago, found that families with pets have children with fewer problems  than those without pets. “Pets obviously represent a mental hygiene resource of vast importance in our technological society, even as they did in the society of primitive man, who domesticated animals not only for his economic view but for his emotional needs as well”, wrote Levinson.

Dogs give children work to do in the home. They help to build their egos and sense of control. It helps them feel needed, and it gives them great confidence to learn to control a living thing in a humane way. Doctors report that very young children are in urgent need for extensive body contact. Children need some agent that will be soft, cuddly, yielding and present. A dog can assist a child in filling emotional needs that are not always forthcoming in the busy lives of their parents, and teach them the responsibilities of caring for something outside of themselves.

The child learns to walk between one and two years of age, and having an active pet to follow around, says Levinson, “encourages the child’s crawling, increases the use of fine muscles, and makes the process of learning to walk easier and even more pleasurable.” Children can learn from animal health issues the mechanics of health care, and to learn the importance of taking care of themselves.

Psychiatrists like Dorothy Burlingham and Anna Freud have long argued that pets are an object of fantasy for children, a critical tool for strengthening a child’s understanding of reality and perspective. Children who mistreat or abuse animals often grow up to abuse and mistreat people, sometimes with great violence.

Through their dogs, and learning to care for them, the child can acquire their first understanding of empathy, to feel sorry for another’s misfortunate and happy for their success. Loving a dog is almost all about empathy, since they cannot speak to us.

Children make up fairy tales and stories about their animal friends, this permits them to work out in fantasy the problems of day-to-day living, to test the truth of their conclusions, to apply these insights to their real lives and relationships.

Burlingham, a famed British analyst, wrote that throughout this period of fantasizing about pets, the child gradually and almost imperceptibly learns to acquire a concept of self, and engage in various forms of make believe that don’t come from screens. This stimulates creativity and imagination.

Children who care for dogs can get off of Facebook or Instagram and smart phones, and out into nature and the natural world. Dogs are a natural and joyous form of exercise, they also give children a sense of safety and companionship when they are frightened, lonely or bored. They encourage children to explore their environment, rather than limit their environment to screens.

Taking care of a pet is the beginning of the assumption of responsibility for someone other than him or her self. Children need this kind of experience of they are to be come mature and successful adults. Children ostracized by friends will always have acceptance from their dog.

For me, so much of this is common sense, I regret citing so much of other people’s studies. I have been around dogs my whole life, I know what they dig for me, I saw what they did for my bookish and shy daughter, now a media executive in New York City.

What a shame we live in a world where the people who control the sale and adoption of dogs seem ignorant of their importance to us and the lives of our children. You have only to watch the new to see the value of dogs and other animals in the lives of the young, or the consequences of banning them from their lives.

“A child who is exposed to the emotional experiences inherent in playing with a pet is given many learning opportunities that are essential to wholesome personality development,” wrote Levinson. His play with the pet will express his view of he world, its animals, and its human beings, including his parents and peers.”