Why You're Still Doing All the Pet Care (and How to Get Your Family to Step Up)

Ever feel like you're the only one who remembers to feed the dog, clean the litter box, or refill the water bowls? You’re not alone, and you don’t have to keep doing it all.

This bonus summer episode gives you a complete system to get your household to step up and share the pet care load, without nagging, yelling, or turning into the resentful pet parent you swore you’d never be.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER:

• The communication traps that keep you stuck doing everything yourself
 • How to host a productive “pet care reset” meeting that works
 • Step-by-step ways to assign tasks fairly and create accountability
 • What to say when someone forgets their pet care job without starting a fight

If you’re ready to stop being the unpaid CEO of Pet Operations and finally get the help you deserve, this episode is your action plan.

Bonus download mentioned in the episode: Get your FREE guide to getting help with pet care. 

Chapters

• 0:31 Summer Surprise Bonus Episode
• 1:44 The Pet Parent Burnout Problem
• 4:25 Common Communication Mistakes
• 7:16 The Family Meeting Reset
• 8:43 Creating Effective Pet Care Charts
• 18:03 Communication Techniques That Work
• 25:19 Solo Pet Parent Survival Hacks
• 31:47 Final Thoughts and Encouragement

Transcript

Amy Castro: 0:00

Surprise! I know we said we were on break until August 10th, and we really are, but I decided to drop this bonus episode because, let's face it, summer can be chaos. Kids might be home, maybe you've adopted a new pet, and somehow you end up doing all the pet care while everyone else just vibes out for the summer. This episode is all about getting the other humans in your house to step up and share the load without you having to nag, yell, or pull a muscle dragging the litter box to the curb by yourself. When we come back in August, we're going to have a new name, a new approach, and even more practical help to make life with pets work better for you. Until then, enjoy this bonus because you deserve a little backup. Ever find yourself feeding the pets, scooping the poop, and handling everything while everyone else is too busy building Lego towers or binge watching Netflix? Well, today we're calling out the biggest mistakes that might be keeping you stuck doing it all and laying out a real plan to reset, reassign, and reboot the pet care around your home without nagging, begging, or losing your damn in mind. Welcome back to Muddy Paws and Hairballs. I'm Amy Castro, your straight-talking guide through the wild, wild world of pets, life, and everything messy in between. Today, we're not just venting about doing it all. We're going to fix it. If you're tired of feeling like you're the only one in the family who even notices the water bowls are empty, you're in the right place. And don't worry, my solo living listeners, I've got you covered too with a few ninja-level survival hacks later in the episode. To make things easy, I've put together a free guide that walks you through everything we're going to talk about today. You don't need to take notes or try to remember all the steps. I'll give you the link later in the episode so you can download it and start putting it into action right away. So let's start with this. If you're feeling like you're carrying the entire pet care load on your back, you're probably not wrong. And you're not broken. And you're definitely not alone. But here's the kicker. Sometimes the way that we ask for help actually guarantees that we don't get it. Now, I don't want to get on my soapbox here too much, but some of you may not realize that my alter ego, Amy Castro, professional speaker, trainer, and communication coach, actually knows a thing or two about communicating with other people. But I'll tell you right up front. Number one, I'm not perfect. And number two, sometimes even I forget what I'm supposed to do. So don't feel like today I'm trying to be judgy or preach or anything like that. I just want to give you some communication tools to put in your pet parent communication toolbox that will help make your life easier and help you get a little more help around your home in caring for your pets. So here are some of the biggest mistakes you might be making that are keeping you stuck doing it all. First of all, timing people. Timing is so important. Too many times when we are the ones that end up getting a lot of the pet care responsibilities dumped on us, we wait until a blowing point and we decide, I'm ready now. I'm ready to blow. Somebody's going to pay. We don't necessarily think about the timing for the other person. So one of the mistakes is bringing things up at the worst possible moment. So while your kids are in the middle of a Lego build and they're three quarters of the way of getting that tower built or your partner is watching that movie they've been waiting to to sit down and watch for the last week and there's 10 minutes left and now you decide everything's got to stop and the litter box needs to be cleaned. Okay, that's a rookie mistake. Don't make that mistake because you're very rarely ever going to get any cooperation when you approach things like that. The other thing is focusing on nagging instead of planning. Just repeating yourself over and over again like that litter box is not going to clean itself. The litter box is not going to clean itself. Have you cleaned the litter box yet? At some point you can nag, you can remind as much as you possibly can, and you quickly realize that that's not working. But for some reason, you keep doing it, hoping that it's going to work the 15th time or the 15,000. So don't keep nagging. You've got to take a different approach, and I'm going to give you that approach later in the episode. The other thing I would say is stop using sarcasm, passive aggression, or explosions. When it comes to conflict situations and taking care of pets can turn into conflict situations, especially, like I said, when it all falls on you, we're going to fall into our natural personality when it comes to conflict. So some of you are going to be sarcastic. That litter box doesn't clean itself. Boy, I can smell that cat poop from here. I guess Buddy's never going to get a walk. Poor Buddy, you're just out of luck. They know your games by now, people. Your significant others, your family members, they know that that's your MO and they also know how to ignore it. So using sarcasm, passive aggression, or going to the other extreme and just blowing up. I mean, we know that kids that have parents that scream, scream, scream all the time become basically immune to screaming. So definitely don't need to wait until you get to that point where the worst of you is coming out. We're going to give you a plan for addressing things early or maybe before problems occur. Another mistake is making it all about your own stress. You know, the bottom line is we got a pet because we wanted to add a loving family member to our family or to our household. And so it's not about mom or dad, whoever's picking up that slack. It's about getting Buddy out for a walk that he needs to be happy and healthy or getting the cat's litter box scooped so that the cat doesn't poop on somebody's bed or get a UTI because they're holding it too long. So don't make it about you. Make it about the pet that your family loves. Another mistake is is just assuming that people know how to do the tasks and do them right. So dumping tasks on kids, or I see this a lot in rescue, the kid that's promising they're going to scoop the litter box, please, if you just get me that kitten, I promise I'll do everything. But do they even know how to scoop a litter box? Do they know how to do it properly? Do they know how often it needs to be done? All of that needs to be spelled out and don't make assumptions about it. Same thing with adult household members. I mean, we've all seen people who we've gone to their house and the whole house smells like litter box because their concept of cleaning the litter box is let it fill up with poop and dump it at the end of the week. That's not how I roll. So if that's not how you roll, then make sure that we're making those expectations known. And then last but not least, trying to manage everyone forever. It should not be your responsibility to stay on top of all of these things if you happen to be the primary pet caregiver. If you try to manage all this on your own, congratulations, you are now the unpaid CEO of Household Pet Operations. And guess what? You ain't getting any stock OK, so if you're nodding your head at all of these thinking, yep, that's me or some of those are me, we're about to hit the reset button. OK, we've got to start over. And the secret to getting this under control is probably not what you think. So here's how we flip the script. No more chasing. No more nagging. No more wondering why nobody cares that you're the one that's cleaning up the vomit at 10 o'clock at night while everybody's watching a movie. OK, if you want people to actually hear you, don't ambush them. All right. So I'm a big proponent. Doesn't matter if your family is. We're talking about two leggers here versus four legged family members because they're not going to be part of the family meeting. So whether it's one other person in your household or six, you're going to want to set a family meeting. And that family meeting needs to be at a time that is calm. That is not just a spontaneous. We need to sit down and talk about this now. It's going to be set in advance when everybody's schedule allows so that we can all participate equally calmly, productively and successfully. snacks and bribes are certainly acceptable and always appreciated. You know, if you have kids, bribe them with a pizza party. We're going to have a pizza party Friday night and we're going to have a family meeting after we eat pizza or maybe before we eat pizza. But the key is getting buy-in. So frame it positively. You know, don't say the people around here haven't been carrying your responsibilities and we're going to sit down on Friday night and we're going to have a meeting about it so that everybody's week is entirely ruined because they're having that hanging over their head the entire time. So, hey, I wanna make sure we're all set up to keep all of our pets happy and healthy and make life as easy as possible for all of us. So let's get a family meeting together and we can brainstorm options and talk about what needs to be done so that Buddy and Fluffy can be happy and healthy and we can too. Now, my second tip beyond having the family meeting to reset and reboot is creating a pet care task chart. Now, you can have a draft ready in advance Or you can create it from scratch at the family meeting. If you want to save time, set it up, do it in advance. So what I'm talking about here is a document that indicates, and depends on how many pets you have, but what is the pet, what tasks need to be completed. So walking, feeding, litter box cleaning, grooming, bathing, nail clipping, poop or scooping the yard, whatever it might be, all of the tasks that go along with taking proper care of that pet are going to get listed down the left side of the chart, okay? You can make yourself a nice little spreadsheet. The reason we want to write down all these tasks is because you can't fix what's invisible. So it would be something you're going to put on paper maybe at first, and then maybe you're going to transfer it to a whiteboard because nothing says business like a big old chart in the mudroom or in the kitchen or wherever in the hallway coming in the front door, wherever you put it. So make sure that you, when you're writing down these tasks, I want you to do a couple of things. Make it super, super clear, okay? So it's not just feed pets. You know, it's feed Buddy morning, feed Buddy afternoon, clean Buddy's water bowl, you know, morning, afternoon, whatever it might be. I mean, you've got to find a balance of breaking it out, but try to break it out as much as possible because the more you break tasks down, the more you can divvy them up. Sometimes the less challenging it feels like, oh, I've just got to clean the bowl. That's my task this morning. Or, oh, I've just got to put the food in the bowl for Buddy this morning. I don't have to feed all pets, which can seem a little bit overwhelming. The other thing I would recommend doing just so that you can make sure that you're assigning things fairly is across the top of the chart, indicate how many times a week that has to happen, what days of the week that has to happen, and also track how long each item takes, just as an example. So I did this when I was relatively newly married, when I felt like my husband and I were both working, we both work kind of the same hours, and I didn't feel like he was doing his fair share around the house. And in his mind, he's like, I take out the trash. I mow the lawn. I do this. And he did. He had a list of things that he did that was fairly equal to the list of the things that I did. However, the trash only goes out twice a week and the trash only takes whatever time to go out. The lawn gets mowed once a week and it takes an hour to happen. Going to swim practice five days a week and sitting there for two hours or the commute back and forth an hour each way, that's different. So creating a chart like this with the tasks, the amount of time it takes How many days a week it occurs and creating blocks for people to fill in their names allows you to assign responsibilities based on people's schedules, based on their physical abilities. You know, you've got little kids that can only do certain things, things like that. And you can reassess every single week and change the jobs up. Maybe the job of cleaning the litter boxes was too much for the six year old. And so you're going to have to do something different or bringing in the 50 pound bag of dog food might be too much for somebody to handle. So you can reassess and reassign And then, you know, if you set up your chart right, you've got the ability to set it up so that as those tasks occur, people can check off what they've done. And then you've got that automatic kind of accountability built into your chart. and oftentimes that falls to pet moms, then yeah, you are trying to get some stuff off of your plate because this is our pet, not my pet. So stress the why. Why is it so important that these tasks get taken care of? And the bottom line with a lot of them, with pretty much all of them, is they can't do these things themselves. They rely on us to do them for them, to live happily in our families. And make sure when you're having this discussion throughout your family meeting, you know, really focus on that need to meet the needs of the pet. You know, instead of saying, I'm sick and tired of being the only person who does this or does that, or I'm sick and tired of being the only one who cares about the pets, say something like, hey, Daisy depends on all of us. She can't grab a snack. She can't fill her own water bowl. She trusts us to take care of her, and that's a team job. So you've got to get everybody on board with this responsibility. Shift the conversation from blaming to responsibility and caring for our pets who can't care for themselves. And again, as a reminder, assign tasks based on reality, not hope or promises on the part of kids, because sometimes they're just not physically able to, sometimes they're not, their schedules don't allow. And then sometimes you're just being unrealistic and setting everybody up for failure. For example, assigning the walk the dog responsibility to your teenager that sleeps till noon. If the dog needs to be walked at 6am and can't wait till noon, then that 6am walk is probably not a good job to assign the teenager. Even if you get an agreement, you're fighting an uphill battle trying to make that happen for a especially in the summertime, just as an example. There's a fine balance between holding people accountable and making them responsible and matching responsibilities and tasks to people's real schedules, their real energy levels, and their real abilities, because the goal is to work together for success, not to teach people a lesson. So, for example, you know, little kids, jobs like, you know, putting the food in the bowl or refilling water bowls, things like that are probably appropriate jobs. Teens, maybe the pooper scooping, because it doesn't have to happen at 6 a.m. It can happen when they get up at noon or maybe bathing the dog because that doesn't have to happen at a certain time of day. If you have a partner that has a busy schedule, maybe that once a month heartworm pill, remembering that is one of their responsibilities or nightly medications if your pet gets medication because they're not there to do the vet appointments or vice versa. So just think about the assignments of making them fair, but also being firm. Everybody needs to be doing their fair share within reason. And I Last but not least, I mentioned the idea of having the check marks as being a source of accountability. I cannot overstate the necessity for that. You know, sitting around and having a family meeting and everybody nods their head and smiles and says, yes, I've got that. That's what I'm going to do. It's not going to happen. All right. So if it's not written down or if there's not alarms set for it to happen, it's not going to exist. And this is where most people have a tendency to fall apart. Setting the expectations is not enough. You have to create a system that make it visible early on whether things are happening or not. So again, the whiteboards are great ideas. Phone alarms, everybody can sit right there. Even the littlest kids have phones, it seems, these days. So set reminders for walking, feedings, or medication. You can use apps. There are family organizer apps like Cozy or shared Google calendars. Maybe you have a shared pet calendar. And then I highly recommend that every week you do a check-in, just a quick check-in, to see how things are going. Whether it's resetting on the next Friday night, where we're going to switch up the and give people new responsibilities, or at minimum, just an opportunity to say what went well, what got missed, what needs adjusting, who's having problems or struggles getting their responsibilities done. But the bottom line is it's about the pet's well-being and making sure that we work together as a team or as partners, not about... busting people and catching them failing. But even if you do all that, you've got your systems in place, you're doing some check-ins. I'm just telling you right now, and you already know as you're listening to this, things are not going to work as smoothly as it's magically fixed and things are happening. So what we need to do is we need to have a plan for when those boxes are not checked. We can't wait till Friday to say that the dog hasn't been fed all week or that the litter box hasn't been scooped or the dog hasn't been taken for a walk or the bunny's rabbit cage hasn't been cleaned, whatever it might be. All right. So you have to have methodology. So this is where I want to give you some tools for communicating when things are not kind of going as planned. So here's what generally happens, right? We create this great plan. Everybody is excited or at least moderately excited and on board. And then the plan starts falling apart. You're watching it start falling apart. And then you fall right back into old habits of communicating. So you start the screaming, the yelling, the sarcasm, the not so subtle hints, and everything just kind of falls apart. Right. So here's where I really want to put on my communication expert hat and give you some techniques that you can try to keep things on track. All right, so number one, bring things up early not days later. You want to address it when it's a speed bump, not a sinkhole. So what you're going to do is you're not going to nag. You're not going to be throwing out hints and hoping people get them, that kind of thing. You're going to start with what's called a perception check. Perception check is something as simple as, here's what I noticed. Is it happening because of A? Is it happening because of B? Please clarify for me. So you assign to your teenager to get the dog food out of the car and load the dog food containers. And you walk by and you notice, and this is the next day, right? You know, walk by, you notice the dog food container is still empty and your teenager is laying on the sofa watching SpongeBob SquarePants. So you say, hey, I noticed the dog food container is still empty. Is that on your to-do list for later today or did you forget? And then just stop. The question is implied. And that gives the teenager an out. They can say, I forgot. Awesome. Are you, you know, when do you think you can get that done? Or they might say, I forgot. And they might actually get up and go grab the dog food bag. Or they might truthfully or not, doesn't matter, say, oh yeah, I'm definitely going to do that later today. What time do you think you'll have it done? Four o'clock. Okay. And then you want to check in on it at four o'clock, right? Because old habits are not going to die overnight. It's going to take a while, but notice I didn't have to yell. I didn't have to be angry. I didn't have to be sarcastic. It's just a check-in. And because it's not an attack, I don't get the defensive response back from that partner or teenager. All right. So if the problem happens again, now we need to go from a perception check, which we've already done, to a let's sit down and talk about what's going on, because this is now two times that this thing has happened. So this is what you're going to do. I'm going to give you this little pattern. Number one, state. State what you observed. I notice that the dog container is still empty, despite the fact that you said yesterday that you were going to fill it when you were done watching SpongeBob. Second step, Wait, date, and then wait. I've stated what I've observed. I'm waiting for a response. When you wait for a response, you're going to get a couple of things. So admission is, you're right, I screwed up. I'll go do it now. Defense is, why do I have to do everything around here? Why are you always nagging me? Denial, I didn't know that was my responsibility. So you know one of those three things is going to happen. And so be prepared. What am I going to say when one of those three things comes out of their mouth in some form or fashion? And because the person that you are talking to is somebody that you probably know pretty well, You know where they're going to go. You know what their methodology is going to be. But wait for that response and then just go back to reminding them of the goal. So I understand and I hear you that that's what happened. But you accepted the responsibility to fill that dog food container. You said you were going to do it. Not once. But now this is the second time. It's not done. What are you going to do differently starting tomorrow to make sure that your tasks, your responsibilities on the chart get done? So this is reminding them of the goal. So what is it? I'm reminding you of the goal. The goal is this needs to be done. What are you going to do to make it happen? So you're asking them for a specific solution because obviously you reminding them is not what you want to put yourself into that position. So maybe they need to set a phone reminder. Maybe they need to pay better attention to the chore chart and make sure that they're checking it every single day. Maybe they need to specifically focus on checking it every single day when they come in from school or come in from work. What's on my chart for this evening or for today? So they need to come up with a plan. You can you can certainly tell them a plan. You know, you should do this or you should do that. But it's always better when they come up with their own plan, because number one, it doesn't sound like you're bossing them around. And number two, maybe their plan is going to be better than your plan. But if they're like, oh, I don't know. I don't know what I'm going to do to remember. I can't possibly remember this. Then you can certainly offer solutions. And then the last step is to agree on a new plan. So from now on, you're going to set an alarm for every Thursday at 3 p.m. to check the dog food container to make sure it's full, whatever they agree on. So state what you observed, wait for a response, remind them of the goal, ask them for a solution, agree on a plan. And oh, by the way, you just got my problem solving class. So this can actually be used for any kind of thing beyond pet care, but it's just a calm, productive way to have a conversation about a problem that is recurring in your life. And last but not least, think about consequences. My mom was the queen of threatening. She would threaten all kinds of things. I'm not going to pay your college tuition. I'm going to call the police on you if you walk out the door. I'm going to sell your horse if you don't do X, Y, Z. But she was not a queen of follow through. So she was just a threatener and nobody listens to a threatener. So make sure if you're going to set consequences like if this happens again, here's what's going to happen. You better be prepared and willing to make that consequence occur the very next time that the problem happens. So be very careful about throwing out consequences. However, I think consequences are important because most of the time people don't follow through because of a couple of things and consequences is one of them. Number one, they don't see why whatever it is that the task is, is important. Well, hopefully you've made that pretty darn clear. It's for the survival and the health and the happiness of the pet. So if they don't see that, you kind of have a problem and you might need to reassess whether you need to have pets in your house. Okay. Second reason, if beyond understanding the importance, they don't understand what the expectations. So you could, you could certainly ask some questions of the person like, Hey, is there something that you don't understand about this task. You know, maybe your child doesn't have a good grasp on what cleaning the litter box could look like. You know, is it just dumping out the litter or is it bleaching it, scouring it, scrubbing it? So make sure those expectations are clear. Another reason why people don't follow through is because they don't know how or they physically couldn't or maybe their schedule is getting in the way. So that's definitely something to be explored. But barring all of those consequences. So if there are no consequences for me not doing something, why would I do it? especially something unpleasant like poop or scooping the yard. Nothing happens if I don't do it, but also there's good consequences, right? So if nothing happens when I do it, like I don't have somebody say, hey, Paul, thank you so much for poop or scooping the yard. I really appreciate you getting up early this morning and taking care of that so we can enjoy the barbecue today, whatever you're going to say. But people respond to consequences, good ones, praise and positive feedback, and they also respond to negative ones. And so I would say look for the opportunities to provide the good ones. You know, good work that gets noticed gets repeated. So especially when you're talking about kids, but really for anybody showing some appreciation for what they've done, even if it's their job or their responsibility. So what? Make them feel good about doing what they're supposed to do. But I think it is important to really look at the consequences that you're willing to follow through on if the task continues to get forgotten. So many times, just as an example in families, people will threaten their kids with, well, we're going to get rid of the dog. If you can't take that dog for a walk, we're going to get rid of the dog. Are you really willing to do that? Because if you're not, then you're wasting your time threatening that. You're a threatener, not a consequence provider. So I look at my consequences as not threats, but, and this is the phrase that I use, promises of resulting action. And am I going to make that happen? Is that action going to actually occur? Great. then go ahead and throw it out there. But if you're not really willing to get rid of the family dog because your kid won't poop or scoop the yard, then you need some other consequence to come up with before you threaten that. That's enough on my soapbox of communication. So if you identify the tasks that need to be done, how they need to be done, when they need to be done, and who's going to be doing them, and then you hold everybody, including yourself, accountable, and this doesn't have to be your job necessarily as the former primary pet care provider. I think having a chart and having every body hold each other accountable is a good thing, especially in a family. So keep that in mind. But if you fix this and then you have the accountability in place, you fix the system and you can always reassess as you go along. So to wrap things up in today's episode, you're not wrong for needing help. You're not wrong for wanting more balance in your life. And you're definitely not crazy for being tired. Building better pet care habits isn't about being the bad guy. It's about creating a team where everybody steps up. And if your first plan doesn't go perfectly, that's not failure. That's feedback. Keep going. Go back. Reassess what slipped. tweak the plan and keep moving forward. And hey, if you ever need a little backup from me, you know where to find me and I am always happy to help you. Before you go, don't forget to grab your free guide on how to get everyone in your house to help with pets. It breaks down the simple system I shared today in this episode and the exact communication tips that actually work without nagging, guilt trips or meltdowns. Just head to bit.ly forward slash share pet care to download it. That's bit.ly bit.ly forward slash share pet care because you shouldn't have to do it all on your own and you deserve backup. Thanks for listening to Muddy Paws and Hairballs. Be sure to visit our website at muddypawsandhairballs.com for more resources and be sure to follow this podcast on your favorite podcast app so you'll never miss a show. And hey, if you like this show, text someone right now and say, I've got a podcast recommendation. You need to check the show out and tell them to listen and let you know what they think. Don't forget to tune in next week and every week for a brand new episode. And if you don't do anything else this week, give your pets a big hug from us. y