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It actually sounds quite harmless what the TV broadcaster RTL is spreading in advance through its new family documentary "Train your baby like a dog": It is about "positive reinforcement" in helping to raise children to "animal-assisted methods" and the search for a way out of the "negative spiral".

A dog trainer visits two families who cannot get along with their offspring and teaches them a few tricks from dog training.

The station becomes clearer in a podcast: It says that an animal trainer will try to "apply the methodology of consistent training that she uses with dogs to dealing with children".

What the broadcaster describes there causes real trouble even before the first episode is broadcast.

There is already a petition on the net that speaks out against the program, which will not be broadcast until January 3rd.

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The renowned Hamburg child psychiatrist Michael Schulte-Markwort and the criminal lawyer Gerhard Strate warn RTL managing director Jörg Graf urgently not to broadcast the program.

Graf, in turn, thinks that RTL wanted to take up the issue of upbringing and "deliberately put forward a provocative thesis".

The two critics see it very differently.

"The title of this program, which comes across as an imperative, contradicts our constitution's concept of man," write Schulte-Markwort and Strate in a letter to Graf on December 27th.

The child is a being with its own human dignity and its own right to develop its personality.

"There can therefore be no discussion about your 'provocative thesis' which contradicts this image of man," said the authors.

A program with such a title, argue the two, "violates human dignity and is an inadmissible offer" within the meaning of the State Treaty on the protection of minors in the media.

Should RTL insist on broadcasting the program that "propagates the transfer of methods of dog training to the upbringing of children", the authors announce the involvement of the Lower Saxony State Media Authority.

The authority is responsible for RTL and can take supervisory measures.

This includes fines, blocks, revocations or prohibitions.

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“Of course,” said the two authors to WELT, “we don't know about the program until it has been broadcast.

The title is derailment.

It is sensational and should get stuck.

This intention contradicts the requirements of the State Treaty. "

In response to a WELT request, the broadcaster asserts that everything is right.

“The preparation and support of the entire production was carried out by a media education specialist,” said a spokesman.

In the run-up to the shooting, she visited both families and each prepared an expert opinion in which she classified the upcoming shooting as harmless from a media pedagogical point of view.

"The finished episode was first presented to the media education specialist and then to the district youth welfare office in Cologne," said the spokesman.

In addition, RTL managing director Graf had offered that Schulte-Markwort could openly express his criticism in a broadcast.

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On Wednesday RTL posted a preview on the broadcaster's website.

There the dog trainer Aurera Verebes from Backnang appears and is supposed to solve the problems of a Berlin couple who cannot get along with their indolent four-year-old daughter.

The animal trainer's recipe comes directly from dog training: If the child does what you tell them, they hear a click from a so-called "clicker" and receive a reward - a "treat", so to speak.

Animals equate the clicking sound with the reward and are trained that way.

But it can also work with small children, and even if so, should it?

"A traumatic bond that has nothing to do with love"

Last year, the Austrian newspaper “Der Standard” took a critical look at the format, which was first broadcast in England in 2019.

RTL has acquired the license for Germany.

The Viennese family therapist Sandra Teml-Jetter, author of several specialist books, sees this critically: "The child can only choose between the options of punishment or reward - and no room is given to what it wants," she told the "Standard".

Teml-Jetter emphasized that parents have to give orientation - just like dog owners their animals.

The main difference, however, is that parents are not child owners.

"These kinds of parenting methods create a traumatic bond that has nothing to do with love," Treml-Jetter told the newspaper.

Schulte-Markwort finds even more drastic words.

"If I judge correctly, then the 'experiment' propagates educational measures that endanger the child's welfare," he writes to Graf.

"I urge you to deal with it again."