Your puppy has been home three days, you've had about four hours of sleep, and three people have given you three different answers about when it can meet other dogs. That's a normal first week. Most of the advice isn't wrong, it's just written for a puppy three months older than yours.
Most puppy care tips for new owners assume a puppy that has already settled in. Yours hasn't yet. What follows is the first month in the order it actually matters, and it's the same sequence Luke Buchanan, Owner of The Toe Beans Co and Sydney's Puppy Trainer, works through in every first at-home session, whether that's a one-bedroom flat in Bondi or a terrace in Marrickville with a courtyard the size of a rug.
The first 48 hours
The first 48 hours are about settling in, and training comes later. Your puppy has just left its litter and everything it knows, so the only job for two days is making the house predictable.
Decide where it sleeps before it arrives. Two options work. Put the crate in your bedroom and move it a little further towards the door each night until it ends up in its own space, or sleep in the same room as the puppy for one or two nights and then move out. Both are fine. Picking one and sticking with it is what matters.
Then the rule owners find hardest: never open the crate while your puppy is crying. Not on night one, not at 3am, not when you feel awful about it. Wait for 30 to 60 seconds of quiet first, then open it. Letting a puppy out mid-cry teaches it that crying is the thing that opens the door, and that lesson lands in a single night.
Set an alarm for around 1am for the first week or so. Carry your puppy outside without talking to it, give the toilet command, wait, small treat, straight back to the crate. No chat, no play, no light show. Push the alarm later by twenty minutes or so each week as bladder control builds. And keep total crate time under five hours across the day. A crate is a bed, not a holding pen.
Feeding in the first month
Puppies eat three meals a day from eight weeks to six months, then drop to two meals a day until about two years old. Portion size comes from your vet or your breeder rather than from a blog, because it shifts with breed and expected adult weight.
The part most owners miss is the shape of the meal, not what's in the bowl. Eat something yourself before the bowl goes down, even a cracker at the bench. Ask for a sit, wait, then release your puppy to the bowl. If it wanders off with food still in there, pick the bowl up within a second or two. Don't leave food down all day, and vary the time you feed by twenty or thirty minutes so meals arrive on your schedule rather than on demand.
The classic month-one mistake is the fussy-eater spiral. Puppy sniffs the bowl and walks off, owner panics and swaps to a different flavour, puppy learns that walking away produces a better option. Two weeks later you're on your fourth food and the puppy is running the kitchen.
Sleep, and why an over-tired puppy looks like a badly behaved one
An eight-week-old puppy sleeps 16 to 18 hours a day. That's far more than most owners expect, and the gap between what a puppy needs and what it gets is behind a lot of what gets reported to me as bad behaviour in week two.
An over-tired puppy bites harder, zooms round the lounge at 7pm, and stops hearing you entirely. It's over threshold, which is the point where arousal is high enough that calm behaviour isn't available to it any more. You can't train a puppy out of that state. You can only put it to bed.
Exercise has a ceiling too: five minutes of on-lead walking per month of age, twice a day. An eight-week-old puppy tops out around ten minutes, twice. Over-exercising a young puppy damages joints in ways that don't show up for years, and puppies won't tell you they've had enough until they're already sitting down on the footpath refusing to move. In Sydney that also means checking the ground temperature in summer, because a puppy on hot concrete is a vet visit waiting to happen. Grass where you can.
The toileting rhythm: PEES
PEES stands for Potty, Exercise, Eat, Sleep, and it's the order every waking cycle runs in. Potty first thing on waking, every single time. Then exercise, which at this age means play, a little lead work and safe socialisation. Then food. Then sleep, more of it than you'd guess.
Carry your puppy to the toilet spot rather than letting it walk there, at least for the first few weeks, or it'll go somewhere on the way. Take it out after waking, after eating, after playing, and every 45 to 60 minutes in between. Use one command, say it once, and only say it once you're already standing in the toilet area. Never inside the house. A high-value treat within one or two seconds of success, saved for this and nothing else.
Accidents are a management problem before they're a training one. If you catch your puppy mid-act, stay calm and then take them outside. If you find the mess afterwards, say and do nothing at all. Your puppy can't connect a reaction to something it did fifteen minutes ago, and all you'd teach it is that you're unpredictable near puddles.
Clean with an enzymatic cleaner rather than soap or disinfectant. Ordinary cleaner takes the smell away for you and leaves the scent marker for the puppy, which is exactly why it goes back to the same corner. Leave the actual toilet spot lightly scented rather than scrubbed. Dogs pick their toilet by smell.
Apartment living changes the logistics, not the rhythm. Pick one patch, a balcony tray or one square of grass downstairs, and use only that. Small courtyards work the same way. And when it's bucketing down in April, go out anyway. Standing under an umbrella for three minutes beats restarting toilet training in winter.
Socialisation: the window closes at six months
The socialisation window closes at six months. Not sixteen weeks. The 8 to 16 week stretch you keep reading about is the early part of that window, and it's when group puppy school runs, which is why the two get mixed up so often. Puppy school finishing at 16 weeks doesn't mean the window has shut. You've got until six months, and what you do with weeks 16 to 24 counts just as much.
Before the second vaccination, socialisation happens on your terms and in controlled settings. Dogs you know are vaccinated, matched by size and weight rather than age, because a 12-week German Shepherd can already outweigh a six-month dachshund. People of every age, size and way of moving. Children. Traffic noise. The bin lorry. Tiles, grass, gravel, metal grates. Take your puppy to the vet and the groomer once before there's a medical reason to go, so the first association isn't a stressful one.
Quality beats headcount here, and it isn't close. Ten calm meetings do more than fifty chaotic ones. Don't let an over-excited dog crash into your puppy at the park because the other owner says "he's friendly", and never call your puppy over purely to end its play, because you'll spend the next year rebuilding recall. When something new worries your puppy, the technique we teach is Making Nothing Of It: stay low-key, keep your own attention elsewhere, and let your puppy work out for itself that nothing is happening. Our guide to the puppy socialisation window breaks the schedule down week by week.
What to skip in month one
Most first-month mistakes are made by owners doing their best. These are the ones I see most:
- Big emotional hellos every time you walk in or open the crate. Come in, ignore the puppy, wait until it settles, then give it attention.
- Swapping food to chase a fussy mood.
- Long walks because the puppy seems keen. It's keen right up until the damage is done.
- Telling off a puppy for an accident you found rather than saw.
- Patting on demand every time it nudges your hand. Affection on your terms, not on its.
- Booking a formal group class for the week the puppy lands (You should be very wary of any
That last one needs its own section.
When to book training
Book the in-home session early and the group class a bit later. Those are two different things, and owners routinely get them the wrong way round.
If I could delete one piece of first-week advice from the internet, it'd be "get them into a class straight away". The first fortnight is settling. A puppy that's been in your house for four days is still working out where it sleeps and who these people are, and dropping it into a room full of other puppies asks it to learn while it's already over threshold. Group puppy school also needs the second vaccination, which lands around 11 weeks anyway, so the calendar tends to sort this one out for you.
The at-home session is the opposite. Earlier is better, because it's about your house, your routine and where the crate goes, and all of that is being set in week one whether you plan it or not. Get the home setup and crate training right at the start and everything after it gets easier.
After that, the puppyhood timeline does what it always does. Around 10 weeks the honeymoon ends and the sleep deprivation bites. By 12 weeks your puppy is close to fully immunised and ready for group work. At 16 weeks puppy school wraps up. By 20 weeks, gaps in training start showing as lead pulling and the first reactive barking, and at about 32 weeks adolescence arrives and plenty of owners feel the wheels come off. Knowing that's coming is half the battle.
The Complete Puppy Program is built around this exact order. It's front-loaded with what we call The Big 8, which is biting, toileting, routine, crate training, crying, sleeping, home setup and socialisation, before the week-by-week content starts, because those eight are what week one actually throws at you.
Want help putting this into practice?
The Toe Beans Co runs a free SKOOL community where Sydney dog owners get access to training guides, Q&As, and direct support from Luke. Our Before Day One track lives there too, covering everything from choosing a puppy to getting the house ready. It's free to join.
Upcoming Puppy Schools in Sydney
If you want structured, in-person guidance for your puppy, Luke runs regular puppy schools across Paddington, Zetland, Marrickville, Alexandria and Neutral Bay.
Check upcoming dates and book your spot
Frequently asked questions
Q: How much sleep does a new puppy need?
An eight-week-old puppy sleeps 16 to 18 hours a day. Most of the behaviour owners report in week two, the harder biting and the 7pm zoomies, is an over-tired puppy rather than a difficult one. If your puppy has been awake for more than an hour, it's probably due a nap.
Q: When should my puppy start meeting other dogs?
Straight away, with dogs you know are vaccinated, matched by size and weight rather than age. Wider group settings wait for the second vaccination at around 11 weeks. The socialisation window stays open until six months, so there's no need to cram it all into the first fortnight.
Q: What matters most in a puppy's first month?
Routine. A puppy that knows roughly when it eats, sleeps and goes outside settles faster than one being taught commands in a house it doesn't understand yet. Get PEES running as a rhythm and toileting, sleeping and crying all improve at the same time.
