Bringing Your Puppy Home: The First Four Weeks
I've written elsewhere about why the first few weeks aren't really about training. This is the companion piece: what you should actually be doing, week by week, in those first four weeks.
It’s not supposed to be a rigid timetable, and no doubt you will adapt as you go depending on how your puppy gets on - puppies can develop at dramatically different rates. But a framework is genuinely useful: something to come back to at 11pm when you're sleep-deprived and wondering what you're supposed to be doing.
Here's some thoughts which I hope will help you through those early weeks.
Weeks 8-9: Settle First, Everything Else Second
The first three to five days
The instinct when a new puppy arrives is to do everything at once. Introduce them to the family. Invite people round. Start training…SLOW DOWN!
Your puppy has just left their mother, their littermates, and the only world they have ever known. Even the boldest, most confident puppy is processing a significant amount. The single most useful thing you can do in the first few days is give them time to decompress. Keep the world small: the main rooms, the garden. Let that feel safe before you start expanding it.
Puppies at this age need 18 to 20 hours of sleep per day. I'll say that again because most people don't believe it: 18 to 20 hours. A lot of what owners describe as hyperactivity or "wired" behaviour in the evenings is simply overtiredness. Watch the clock, not the puppy. Enforce naps after every one to two hours of being awake, before they hit the wall and become impossible.
Crate training
Start this from day one, but gradually. The goal in week one is not to have your puppy sleeping happily in a closed crate by Day 3. It's to build the association: crate equals good things.
Keep the door open. Feed meals inside it. Toss treats in casually throughout the day (Top Tip: Be the ‘Treat Fairy’ - leave high value treats in the crate without your puppy seeing you put them there - the more they ‘discover’ great things in there, the more they will choose to go in there of theit own accord. If your puppy wanders in on their own, acknowledge it quietly. You are building the relationship between the crate and good outcomes before you ask anything of them. That's should be all you’re looking to do in the first few days and there’s really is no need to rush.
Once your puppy is going in voluntarily, start closing the door for very short periods. Ten seconds. Thirty seconds. A minute. Stay nearby. Open it before they become unsettled. Every session ends calmly. If they're becoming genuinely distressed, you've moved too fast (a little bit of whimpering is completely normal, screaming isn’t).
Overnight: Put the crate in your bedroom, or just outside it, for the first few weeks. I know some people feel strongly about this and feel they need to be left alone to ‘cry it out’ if the get distressed. I'll tell you what I tell clients: puppies are not biologically designed to be alone at night, and proximity reduces stress significantly in the early weeks. When they wake and need to toilet, keep it low-key. Minimal light, no talking, no play. Outside, wait for them to go, quiet praise, small treat, straight back in. Night-time is boring. The clearer that message, the faster they settle into it.
One or two wake-ups a night at this age is completely normal. It gets better week by week.
Toilet training
At eight weeks, toilet training is almost entirely about management rather than teaching. Your puppy physically cannot hold their bladder reliably, and they have no concept yet of where you'd like them to go.
Take them outside immediately after waking, after every meal, after play, and roughly every 30 to 45 minutes in between. Stay with them. The moment they finish toileting (not during, after), mark it with a word and give a small food reward. Timing is everything here.
If there’s an accident, clean it up without drama. It’s usually our fault for not being attentive enough to the signs that they want to go, such as sniffing the floor. Punishing a puppy for toileting in front of you just teaches them to hide to toilet.
Name recognition
Three to five very short sessions per day. Say their name once, clearly, in a neutral tone. The moment they glance toward you, even the slightest turn of the head, mark it and reward. You’re are building a reflex: their name means they look at you means something good happens.
Don't repeat the name if they don't respond. Repeating it teaches them it can be ignored. At this stage you are simply making their name mean something worth responding to.
Weeks 9-10: Deepening the Bond
The sleep, toilet, and crate work is all ongoing. Consistency here is what makes it stick. The additional focus this week is simply being together.
Sit on the floor with your puppy. Let them investigate you, follow you around the house, explore the garden while you sit in it. Get them used to being handled: ears, paws, mouth. A puppy handled calmly and regularly grows into a dog who is easy to examine, groom, and treat at the vet. One who isn't becomes a problem at exactly the moments you can least afford it.
Start very quietly extending the time your puppy spends settled on their own. A few minutes in their crate while you're in the next room, returning before they become unsettled.
One thing you proably don’t want to hear: stop cuddling them all the time! Puppies who are rarely left to their own devices can struggle to develop independence later. Build in quiet time where your puppy simply exists without being engaged. Settled in the crate, or resting in the same room without interaction. You are not neglecting them - you’re teaching them to be comfortable on their own.
By the end of week 10, most puppies are beginning to understand the rhythm of the day. That predictability is doing more for their development right now than any formal training session would.
Weeks 10-12: Careful Exploration
Your puppy may not be fully vaccinated yet, but socialisation cannot wait. The importance of this cannot be over-estimated. Carry them to new environments and let them observe the world from the safety of your arms: a busy street, a café, a car park, a school gate. What you are looking for is calm curiosity. Ears forward, taking things in. If your puppy seems anxious or overwhelmed, you're too close to whatever is worrying them. Increase the distance and let them observe from further away before moving closer, across multiple sessions.
Socialisation at this age is not about exposure volume. It is about positive associations. One new thing, handled well, is worth more than ten things that frightened them.
For the full picture on socialisation, what to prioritise, how to handle it correctly, and why the window matters, my Puppy Socialisation post covers it properly.
You can also begin introducing very simple training during this window. Two to three minutes, once or twice a day. Name recognition is already underway. Add a sit: lure the nose up and back with a treat, the bottom drops, mark and reward the moment it does. Keep it positive, keep it short, and stop before the puppy loses interest. If they're disengaging, you've gone on too long.
Week 12 and Beyond: Building on the Foundation
By twelve weeks, most puppies are sleeping through or close to it. Toilet training is clicking into place. The crate is somewhere they'll go voluntarily. The chaos of the first few weeks has settled into something more manageable.
This is the point at which proper training becomes productive, because the conditions for learning are now in place. Your puppy knows their name. They've begun to understand that engaging with you produces good things. They are settled enough in their new home to focus on something new. The relationship is there to work with.
If you haven't started a structured programme yet, now is the right time. Not because you've missed anything by waiting (you haven't, and the foundation work of the past four weeks has been exactly the right preparation) but because now it will actually stick.
Puppy Foundations is built to follow on from exactly this kind of start, working with puppies from around eight weeks through to the end of the foundation period. If you want to talk through where your puppy is and what would be most useful, get in touch.
A few things worth keeping in mind throughout
Consistency matters more than perfection. There will be days where the routine slips, where the nap doesn't happen, where there's an accident you didn't catch. That's fine. What matters is the overall pattern across weeks, not any individual session.
Everyone in the household needs to be doing the same thing. One person enforcing nap times while another lets the puppy run for two hours produces a confused puppy and an ineffective routine. Get everyone on the same page before the puppy arrives if you can.
The tiredness is real and it passes. The first two to three weeks are genuinely hard. Broken nights, constant vigilance, the relentlessness of a puppy who needs something every hour. It gets considerably easier around twelve to sixteen weeks. You are not stuck here permanently.
Your puppy is learning the whole time. Not just in training sessions but from every interaction, all day. Be deliberate about what picture you're creating, even when you're not consciously teaching anything.