When it comes to greeting people, puppies often become very excited. This can lead to them jumping up at strangers, which is easily rewarded accidentally by people who continue to pet your puppy.

Instead of having your puppy practice undesirable behavior you can teach them to greet people by keeping their paws on the ground, or even sitting calmly throughout.

To do this you first need to get the person approaching your puppy to stop and pay attention. When they call out to see if they can say hello to your puppy, tell them to stop using a visual signal as well as calling out to them. This is really effective at getting them to stop approaching.

Say that your puppy is in training, and you need to get them to focus on you first. Decide if you want your puppy to interact. Look at your dog to see if they are calm and focused, or if they are too excited and wiggly. If they can sit and focus on you, ask them and then continually reward them whilst you explain to the person what to do next.

Get the person to approach slowly and let them know where to pet your dog and that they should move away if your puppy gets up at any point.

Continuously reward your puppy by letting them nibble on a treat in your hand throughout.

Keep it really short and turn your puppy away as the interaction finishes before moving away, to prevent them jumping up at the person when they leave.

Practice a lot and your puppy will get really good at this. You can then start to have short breaks between treats so that your puppy has a chance to choose how to interact and make good decisions.

You want to avoid getting other people to feed your puppy as this will only serve to make people even more interesting and for a social puppy this can cause them to become overexcited around strangers which is not something you want to encourage.

Putting time into practicing polite greetings now will pay massively in the long run.