How to Love Your Child's Pet Rat

Love me, love my friends? Hard to do when you love your child and your child loves…a rat? Learning to love your child’s pet rat will prevent years of cringing, recoiling and lying about your lack of emotional attachment to an aging rodent.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

1. Think of your child’s pet rat as a very small dog. Thinking of it as a rat will make you think of it as a rodent, which will make you think of it as vermin, which will remind you of the plague, cannibalism and the movie Willard. Don’t go there.
2. Let your child take complete responsibility for his or her pet. Your love and admiration for a rat can only dwindle when it brings additional duties to your parental roster plus contact with rat poop.
3. Set ground rules for rodent play: the kitchen is no place for a rat, ditto the dining table. When you know where to find the beast, and where it won’t be seen, you’ll be more comfortable with your furry co-habitant.
4. Encourage your child to make the most of the child/rat relationship: suggest reading books about rats, writing class reports about rats and grandparent visits with the rat (this can also make the most of an antagonistic in-law relationship).
5. Consider your child’s pet rat a learning opportunity. Your child is learning responsibility, animal behavior and cleaning skills. You are learning how to keep a straight face when your daughter asks you, someday, what you think of her new boyfriend “Fang,” every time she lifts up that rat and says, “Isn’t he cute?”
   
   
6. Unlike other pets, your child’s pet rat doesn’t need shots, have to be fixed, require expensive licenses or demand two walks a day. If the rat is a disaster, it will likely be a short one, since many rats live only eighteen months. If it is a roaring success, there are many more rats to be had (for under ten bucks) once your child’s pet rat meets his maker. What is not to love about that?
7. Look into those beady little eyes (ignore the icky tail) and embrace the four-legged creature that has captured your loved one’s heart. Love her, love her rat; it can’t be that hard.

Tips & Warnings

• That plague thing was a big deal, sure, but the real villains were the fleas riding on the rats; don’t hold the rats emotionally accountable for their co-dependents.
• Don’t be too effusive about the rat if you’d like rodent ownership to be a one-time thing in your family. Mention other animals in a favorable light at the first sign of a ratty cough, drop books on bunnies by your child’s bedside or consider the pre-emptive purchase of a kitten to prevent further rodents from moving in.