Increasingly, colleges and universities are responding to students’ elevated stress and compromised mental well-being by introducing dog-therapy stress-reduction programs. Enormously popular, students missing their family dog back home are keen to spend time with dogs brought to campus. Getting buy-in from students isn’t a hard sell.
Alongside the proliferation of on-campus programs, so, too, do we see a spike in the corresponding research conducted on the benefits of students spending time with therapy dogs. A recent scoping review byscanned nearly 1,200 publications identifying 37 that met inclusion criteria for additional in-depth analysis.
If kids need therapy on campus, something(s) about the administration of those institutions needs to change-perhaps quite a lot!