Although the official start of the calendar year is in January, for those of us who have spent more than 20 years in school – and as adults are spending another 20 years ferrying our children to and from school – September is the true month of new beginnings.

New schools, new teachers, new teams, new friends, new clothes, new haircuts, new shoes. Everyone I know is happy to see their children settling into new routines.

But in the rush for the familiar and the comfortable, parents sometimes overlook their children’s growth. It is during this month, not in January, that we parents should try to take a fresh look at our parenting styles and at our children, and not automatically assume that where we left off in June is where we need to be this September.

Children do not develop in the linear fashion we might like them to; all kinds of growth occur at all kinds of rates. “Just as children grow in spurts, so, too, do they develop emotionally, academically, and intellectually,” a psychologist and mother of two children said. “You’re better off thinking of your child’s development as a staircase, as opposed to a diagonal line.”

“My 13-year-old lost his wallet for the third time this month,” a mother of three told me. “The first time I helped him find it. The second time I found it after 45 minutes while he was at school. The third time I said forget it. He’s not 8 years old anymore. He won’t become more responsible if I keep solving his problems.”

It is with our eldest children that we especially need to remind ourselves to set the bar higher. After all, our second and third children are so busy keeping up with their older siblings that they continually raise their own expectations.

Who among us doesn’t coddle the firstborn? A friend of mine with three children said she just stopped dressing her oldest child, who is 8, but only after realizing that her two other children, two and four years younger, were getting themselves dressed.

“Somehow my younger ones view getting dressed as a fun challenge while my oldest child views it as a chore. Or maybe that’s just how I saw it. I didn’t even notice that I was ultimately holding him back until it occurred to me a few weeks ago that if he was old enough to go on a sleepover, he was old enough to get himself dressed,” she said.

One friend of mine with two teenagers struggles to find the right amount of organizational help to offer to her children. “I’ve set up this system where the kids expect me to nag them to get their work done. They expect me to tell them when it’s time to go to their rooms and start working. That the paper is due on Friday. That they won’t have time to finish it tomorrow because of the football game. I want them to internalize their own calendars and their own responsibilities. It’s hard to know how much to expect from them, but I certainly know that my parents had no idea what was due when,” she said.

When you finally find the energy to type up the children’s schedules and post them on the refrigerator, find a little more energy to make a short list of responsibilities for each child. Which children are old enough to make their own beds? Who can help set the dinner table? Who can do the dishes? Who can finish the homework without constant reminding? Who can wake up on their own? Who can pack their own team uniforms – and not forget the cleats?

Don’t expect change overnight. Think in terms of the semester. If you’ve been holding your 12-year-old’s hand for the past few years, deciding when he has to get off the computer, when he has to work, when he has to take a shower, and when he has to go to bed, don’t expect him all of a sudden to know how to manage his own time. Have a conversation about your expectations. Together agree upon what is reasonable. And expect resistance.

With so much going on this time of year, it’s all too easy to continue expecting the same behavior from our children. The anxious girl gets her homework done before dinner. The disorganized boy doesn’t know where his work is. The sullen preadolescent is moody. The athlete is raring to go. Sometimes these assumptions undermine the very changes we are aching for in our children. Children need to know that there is room for growth, and that we expect the growth and the rocky transition that comes with it.

Sometimes, if you just step back and take a look, you’ll be surprised what your children are capable of doing. One day during the summer I picked up my boys early from camp. My younger son, then 4, was coming out of the pool when he saw me. He raced across the field, found his clothes and in 60 seconds flat pulled off his wet suit, threw on his dry clothes, pulled on his dirty socks, and shoved his feet in his sneakers. Was this the same child who whined each morning that he couldn’t possibly get himself dressed? Or was this the child who a year ago whined that he couldn’t possibly get himself dressed and the mother who didn’t notice the change?

Needless to say, Josh now gets himself dressed. Sometimes.

sarasberman@aol.com