Learning Matters: Organization is key to modern-day parenting

I’ve never kept closely to routines, certainly not the daily schedules of reading, studies, exercise and sleep my ninth-grade English teacher encouraged. I still remember Mrs. Finkenbinder’s homework assignment to create a daily schedule, and I recall liking the idea even as I recognized my own more serendipitous inclinations.

Ever since then, I’ve thought wistfully about the possibility of a more disciplined existence, always harboring some hope of attaining it. Meanwhile, I’ve continued to accept “assignments” as they’ve come my way, and I’ve learned from all of them.

Most recently, I accepted our daughter’s invitation to come to her home in Milwaukee for a month to assist her family in welcoming their second child, a brother for his 2-year-old sister. What grandmother could pass up an invitation like that… and in the spring. Milwaukee, right on the shores of Lake Michigan, is particularly lovely in the spring.

MORE: Read past columns from Joylene Wagner >>

Here, the routines of baby, young child and parents define my days and alter my reality. I’m gaining a new perspective on my own experience as a parent and how it differed from our daughter’s. I think about my time as a stay-at-home mom (when I wasn’t going to choir or a meeting) and our daughter’s as a working mom, a committed elementary educator. As in earlier visits with her, I feel my old suppositions shifting.

Two-year-old Piper thrives under the routines of the daycare center her parents chose when they moved here. Two blocks from their house, in a lovely old neighborhood near the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, “Milestones” is early childhood education as research says it should be: full of songs, exploration and play.

The patient, friendly teachers are well-versed in the developmental stages of infants and preschoolers; they deftly handle those “periods of equilibrium and periods of disequilibrium,” our daughter’s own preschool teacher described.

I’ve been walking Piper “to school” most mornings, watching for bunnies and squirrels along the way. When we get there, she walks in, often stopping by the doors to the infant and toddler classes to report on her family’s news.

“I have a baby brother, Adam!” she tells her former teachers, before sitting down in her own class at the craft or science table to string beads (“I made a necklace!”) or roll “Flubber.” Her classmates sing the “ABC Song” as they wash their hands before snack; they count the numbered stairs as they return to the second floor from playtime outside.

Piper goes to daycare and comes home happy, ready for the home pattern of play and dinner, bath, story, lullaby, and bed… in a house considerably tidier than the one her mother grew up in.

“How did that happen?” my husband asks as I describe the orderly existence here, and I don’t have the answer. I just marvel.

Back when our daughter was not long out of college, before she met her husband or knew for sure she’d stay in teaching as a career, we fell into a discussion of parenting and work. I expressed a bias toward mothers being at home with young children, based on my own contented experience — and after several years working at a job I loved but didn’t claim as a career. I was surprised how she bristled at my judgment on her future.

Now, I think she is as surprised as I at how my thinking has changed, how her experience and those of her friends have shifted my view of what works in parenting. I see the variety of activities and people Piper enjoys and how the lessons she learns in daycare blend so naturally into her time at home.

Our children and grandchildren teach us many things, not the least of which is they are not us. If we’re lucky, they appreciate us anyway.

I continue to appreciate Mrs. Finkenbinder and her homework assignment. I’ve seen up close how satisfying a more scheduled life can be.

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JOYLENE WAGNER is a past member of the Glendale Unified School Board. Email her at jkate4400@aol.com.