You brought your puppy home, and now it's 2am and nobody is sleeping. This is normal: your puppy just left their mother and littermates for the first time. Here's how to make the transition easier for everyone.
Why the first nights are so hard
For eight weeks, your puppy slept in a warm pile of siblings. Tonight, they're alone in a strange-smelling place. The crying isn't bad behaviour, it's genuine distress. The goal isn't to tough it out; it's to replace some of what they're missing.
The first-night routine
1. Give them something to curl around. Puppies sleep pressed against their siblings, so a flat empty crate feels wrong to them. A soft plush comfort toy gives them something to hold onto and settle against. Put it in the crate before bed rather than handing it over once the crying starts. Supervise a new puppy with any soft toy for the first few nights.
2. Crate next to your bed for the first week. Your puppy can hear and smell you, and you can drop a hand down when they stir. You can move the crate gradually later.
3. Tire them out, gently. A calm play session an hour before bed, then a potty break right before lights out.
4. A cozy, enclosed bed. Puppies instinctively seek walls to lean against, which is why they pile on their siblings. A donut-shaped bed with a raised rim gives that same enclosed feeling, and a lot of dogs curl into it without being shown. Measure your puppy curled up rather than stretched out, and remember they are going to grow.
5. Ignore the protest cries, respond to distress. Whimpering that fades in a few minutes is normal settling. Escalating panic means take them out for a calm potty break, no play and no fuss, then back to bed.
What not to do
- Don't bring the puppy into your bed just for tonight. That habit sets on night one.
- Don't punish crying. It makes the fear worse.
- Don't play at night. Boring is the goal.
A lot of puppies start settling into a routine within the first week or two, though plenty take longer and there is a wide normal range. A comfort toy plus an enclosed bed is the combination we point new puppy owners at first, because between them they cover the two things a puppy actually lost: something to lean on, and walls.
One thing worth doing in week one while you have the chance: practise leaving. Two minutes, come back calmly, build up slowly. Separation anxiety is far easier to prevent in a puppy than to undo in an adult dog, and the first fortnight is when it is cheapest to do.