FAIRBANKS - Many Americans treat their pets like children. This works fine after your children leave the nest but it has a lot of shortcomings when it comes to dogs and cats.

My permissive approach to parenting worked great with my children. But with my animals, my pet-rearing strategy is not so good. My collie jumps up on me and on every visitor, no matter how many times I plead with him to keep four paws on the floor. I didn’t have the stomach to put my new Maltipoo in her kennel to housebreak her so she still has accidents. And she’s almost a year old.

As a psychologist I thought I knew how to train animals. It’s easy. Just reward good behavior and punish bad behavior. Behavioral modification works. Right?

So why doesn’t it work with pets?

In “Out of the Doghouse and Onto the Couch,” published in Psychology Today, therapist Larry Lachman tells us why so many of our pets misbehave. We treat them like children. Dogs and cats are not children. They are animals. Good parents, for example, try to treat all their children the same. If they don’t, they are showing unfortunate and unfair favoritism. This doesn’t work with animals. I do try to treat my dogs the same. The result is that my pets get confused as to where they stand in their dominance hierarchy.

Dogs do best, Lachman says, where there is a clear rank order and where they know who is on top and who is next in line.

“Dogs are like judges,” my judge husband reminds me. “They need a seniority system.”

Lachman’s business is trying to change the behavior of pets so aggressive and destructive that their owners are thinking about putting them to sleep. He’s what Malcolm Gladwell calls “dog whisperers.”

Lachman had a brainstorm: In many of these dog-misbehaving families, the people treated their pets like children. So why not use the same therapy techniques for pets that have been developed to treat children in disturbed families? Lachman claims astonishing results from his new therapy, “Structural Family Therapy.” He claims over an 80 percent success rate in changing the behavior of delinquent pets.

The fundamental insight of Structural Family Therapy, whether applied to people or to pets, is that you can’t treat any individual in isolation. You have to change the behavior of the family as a group. Applying Structural Family Therapy to your problem pet has two parts:

S-W-R-R. When you catch your pet in the act, first Startle him by clapping your hands or spraying the culprit with water. Then Wait. Then Redirect your pet so he’s doing something right — like playing with you while keeping four paws on the floor. Then Reward your pet.

Now comes the hard part: following proper protocol. You have to go along with the dominance structure in your animal kingdom. Take my collie who is trying to push ahead of his place in the status ranking and get my attention. When he jumps up on me,

I need to restrain my impulse to hug the little imp right back. I have to greet the senior animals first.

Alas, I have yet to find a way to housebreak my maltipoo since I still can’t bear to leave her in the kennel whenever I’m not watching her.

But, you can’t do everything right.

Pets aren’t children. That’s true. And that’s good. My dogs won’t grow up and leave home.

Judith Kleinfeld is a professor of psychology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She welcomes comments or criticism. E-mail: ffjsk@uaf.edu.