Children and mice
Especially fancy mice degenerated to cheap merchandise. Some people don’t think much about when buying them and so they don’t always bear the welfare of the animals in mind. As a result many mice end up as a toy in children's rooms.
Mice usually don’t make proper pets for children below the age of 12. Such young children tend to stress and to overstrain them or hurt them by wrong handling. Additionally most children don't understand, why most mice like it more to be watched than touched. The sensitive creatures are stressed especially by noisier and more active children and stress over a longer period finally shortens the life of the animals.
Additionally for children often coloured plastic equipment is bought. The cages aren't big enough because they have to fit into the often small children's rooms. The keeping is not adopted to the behaviour of mice. They get downgraded and handled like furniture.
As this is no individual case and happens by far more often than animal protectors can accept, mice usually aren't recommended as pets for children.
But mice can be interesting pets for adults with children. The children have to learn, that mummy's or daddy's rodents live in their own world and don't want to play with them. It can be an adventure for children to get involved into caring for the animals and learning how to handle them carefully. But the control of an adult is always necessary.
They learn also that mice need a proper housing and the colourful, fancy toys from the pet shop aren't suitable for them.
Precondition for teaching children the right message of course is that the parents are informed before adopting mice and keep them in a proper way.
Mice aren't very expensive in acquisition and keeping, and show a big repertoire of behaviour, which makes them interesting to watch. That's why they are kept often and gladly by teenagers. Whether mice are the right pets or not, depends on the personal maturity of the mice keeper.
The keeper should be able to handle the animals safely and in the right way, and to take proper care of them. He/she should know, accept and fulfill the needs of the animals.
Important in case of teenagers is that the family agrees to the adoption of mice and the parents are aware of the possible financial consequences. This isn't the case quite often. When an expensive medical treatment gets necessary, paying for it often goes beyond the possibilities of a child’s pocket money and the parents have to help out. If they don't do it, the little rodents get the short end of the stick.
Similar is valid in case of finding out that the housing of the mice is too small or inappropriate and has to be replaced. Such expenses usually blow the budget of a teenager. Additionally there must be some space for the compound and taking that space for mice must be accepted by the family. Not all parents are willing to realise that small mice need more space than one might believe before knowing them.
So the perfect mouse keeping needn’t fail because of missing responsibility of the teen. Also the constraints made by parents and finance may undo the best pretensions. For that cause mice should only be adopted, when they are accepted by the family, not only tolerated.
