The 3 to 6 Month Puppy PlanBiting more at 4 months, not less? You’re not doing it wrong.

The first two weeks are about settling in. Then your puppy gets braver, bitier and busier. Vet visits stack up. Teeth fall out on the rug.

Around month 5, plenty of owners quietly wonder if they made a mistake. Hands covered in little bruises. A puppy who forgot everything she knew last week. Two steps forward, one step back. Call it the 4-month dip.

A shared plan helps your household respond consistently and keep notes for your vet or qualified trainer. It does not promise how quickly this stage will pass.

This plan maps out every week from 12 to 26. You always know what to do next, and what can wait. And for the weeks that go backwards, page 17 tells you what to do while it passes, and when to call your vet.

Try this tonight, free. If the biting spikes around dinner, ask one question before you play harder: “When did she last sleep?” Plenty of owners notice the biting gets worse when a puppy is overtired. A quiet nap in her pen with a chew may do more for your evening than another game of tug.

Every evening, right about when we sat down to eat, our sweet little puppy turned into somebody else. All day she was cuddly. Then seven o’clock hit and she was hanging off my sleeve. Grabbing pant legs. Running laps around the couch with her eyes a little wild and her teeth on everything.

My first thought was the one most people have. She’s got too much energy. Let’s tire her out.

So we played harder. Longer tug. More fetch down the hallway. One more lap around the block.

It got worse.

The night it clicked, I was on the living room rug with a tug toy, getting nipped for the fifth time. My forearm had little red dots on it. Somebody on the couch looked up from their plate and asked, “When did she last sleep?”

We looked at each other. Nobody knew.

We thought back. She’d been awake since lunch. Guests in and out. Kids home from school. TV on. Every time she started to doze, someone said “aww” and picked her up.

So we tried something new. We stopped the game. Calm voice. Quick potty trip. Then into her pen with a chew, lights low, and we walked away.

She was asleep in about four minutes. Out cold for almost two hours. The house was so quiet I could hear the fridge hum.

Was that a magic fix for mouthing? No. Puppies mouth. It’s normal, and teaching a soft mouth takes time and patience. But it showed us that a lot of what we called “bad behavior” was really “missed nap.”

After that we started writing nap times on a sheet on the fridge. Just two columns: up at, down at. When the “up” stretch got long, we could see the evening storm coming before it hit.

That little sheet didn’t stop every nip. It just turned seven o’clock from a surprise into something we could see coming.

If the mouthing ever looks hard, stiff, or scary, that’s a moment for your vet or a qualified trainer. For the everyday land shark hour, though, our fridge sheet did more than another game of tug ever did.