How to fix "Character is not a valid member of Model"?

So I was making a pet thing for a simulator game and I go to try out the pets and there is an error in the output that wasn't in the tutorial I watched.

local function equipPet(player,pet) --pet stuff

	local character = player.Character

Output says "Character is not a valid member of Model" and I click on the error and it takes me to "local character = player.Character". I have also tried workspace:FindFirstChild(player.Name) and that didn't work either. pls help my game was supposed to come out a month ago but we're being held up by this one line of code

When doing workspace:FindFirstChild(player.Name), you're actually getting the player's character model, not the player, meaning you don't need to do player.Character as this is the character.