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The first few months of a kitten’s life is critical to the success of its development of instinctual abilities and behavior. You need to create a careful balance between how the kittens interact with one another and how you interact with them.
The first few days of a kitten’s life and the entire first week of living is usually dedicated to helping the kittens eat and sleep. You need to supply it with a decent place to sleep and make sure it has the needed food and water.
In the cat’s second week of life, they begin to see more clearly and begin to experience their first interactions with humans. You need to be sure to be gentle and quiet during this period when handling the cats, as they will learn what you’re all about during this period and you need to let them know that you’re there to care for them.
By the time they get to be a month old, kittens are beginning to learn to walk and start developing personal likes and dislikes. They begin to realize that they don’t like lying in their own excrement and begin to find out the differences between the places where they sleep and the places where they can urinate and poop. It is at this time also when kittens start to learn what makes them happy and what makes them unhappy. They know when they’re too hot and when their pillows are too hard. They begin to become disgruntled when they’re unhappy.
By the time a kitten becomes six weeks old, it is finally learning to eat on its own. Up until this time you likely will have to feed the kitten yourself and frequently. At the six-week mark, they begin to feel more and more comfortable away from their mothers. They are able to spend a little bit of time away from mom off-and-on until they can fully be weaned at eight weeks.
Two months into their lives, kittens should be taught to drink from a dish and help it be away from its mother. You may want to get the mother involved in this process by having the mother help clean the kittens and help them learn to eat. Some kittens are better at learning to be on their own than others are. It really varies from cat to cat.
Much of what a cat learns about how to behave and act comes from their owners and much of it comes from their mothers. They also learn from one another what they should be doing and when. Keep in mind that kittens find comfort in being around their siblings and their mothers. Don’t rush the weaning process, but know that it needs to be done.
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