One night last week I came in from evening barn chores to find my 2-year-old son, Jack, doing some feeding of his own: He had dragged a stool over to the kitchen counter and dumped the entire box of fish food into the goldfish bowl. Like any smart toddler, he had timed this move perfectly, as I was in the barn and my husband was helping our 4-year-old son, Alden, get cleaned up in the bathroom.

I have discovered over the past four years that parenting and horse-keeping have quite a lot in common, and this moment embodied the two most prominent elements: poopiness, and chaos that erupts in an instant. Horsewomen who are thinking of motherhood can take heart in the knowledge that the years they have spent tending to their horses’ needs create a solid foundation for many parenting skills, such as:

Understanding a needy, nonverbal creature. This is an area where horsewomen really have an edge over women who, prior to parenthood, spent most of their free time contemplating frivolous things such as clothing, reality television, or health care for the uninsured. If you can “read” your horse, for example, maybe his slight shudder means the saddle is a bit too far forward, you have the powers of observation necessary to learn your child’s individual signals. In our house we know that when Jack puts his adorable, pudgy feet on the edge of the oak dining room table and shoves the entire thing across the room, it means he is done with dinner.

Patience with routines. This is a skill you need whether your goal is a gleaming show horse or a healthy child. Horsewomen know how to embrace a mind-numbing repetition of chores and health-care routines. In fact, approached the right way these routines can be a meditative practice leading to a zen-like state. That is, provided no surprises await you, such as the discovery I made the other evening that the new boarder (a seasoned show jumper) had hopped a fence to visit my mare. In that case, zen goes out the window as pure adrenaline pumps through your system while you determine the extent of any damage.

Your waking hours prior to parenthood probably broke down roughly this way: working to earn money for board bill/farm payment: 50 percent. Commuting, including stops at feed store and tack store: 10 percent. Grooming and chores: 20 percent. Riding: 13 percent. Trying to placate spouse/partner: 7 percent. Eating: Effectively 0 percent, as horsewomen just fit this in while driving to the barn.

When you are a horsewoman with toddler(s) at side, your day will go more like this: trying to get out the door (trying to leave the house signals a primitive instinct in children to do three things: poop, get a hand caught in the VCR, and decide they need to find the ONLY toy not lying in plain view on the living room floor): 10 percent. Peeling child(ren) off leg at childcare: 5 percent. Working: 50 percent. Commuting, including stops at feed store and Diapers R Us: 12 percent. Cooking, trying to induce children) to eat, and doing dishes: 13 percent. Trimming children’s tiny finger and toenails: 4 percent. Grooming, chores and riding: 4 percent. Trying to placate spouse/ partner: 1 percent. Leafing through the “Marriage Counselor” section of the phonebook: 1 percent.

Calm in the face of icky things. I don’t think anyone is better prepared than horsewomen to handle the icky things that go with the territory of parenting. If you have ever had to deal with a very ripe dead ‘possum in the stable yard, there is really nothing your child can do that will faze you. Your parental experience with icky things will begin immediately after you bring baby home, because of the traditional drying of the umbilical cord stump. Take a deep breath, think of all the iodine you’ve put on horse wounds, and just do it. When your toddler gets a look of consternation in the bath and you don’t move fast enough to prevent the classic poopy-in-the-bathtub scenario, just think, it’s still not nearly the mess your foal produced when he had the scours.

Training skills. My friend says no one should be allowed to become a parent until she has learned to train a chicken, since supposedly chickens only learn from positive reinforcement, but not from fear or pain. What a rosy world of well-educated chickens it would be if that rule were enforced. For myself, I rationalized that poultry are vectors for encephalitis, and we should keep them off our farm. I skipped right to foals, barn-sour trail horses and, yes, children, for my training experiences. Now I am proud to say that I met most of these challenges: The foals have long since been turned into useful horses, and the lady did pay me for fixing her trail mount. When it comes to the children, however, someone does get trained but that person often turns out to be me.

In my defense, I can only say that children in general are master trainers because they have several advantages. Some of these advantages are: Time. Yes, time is on their side. They have all the time in the world, whereas you harbor deeply-held, irrational convictions about going places and doing things.

Patience. We acknowledged above that you probably have more patience than most people, for instance, the patience to scrub the white on your horse’s legs day after day. However, the patience and persistence that children have is on a different order of magnitude. They have the patience to do things such as count a whole jar of toothpicks–several times over. So it should come as no surprise that they can wait you out. In fact, you don’t stand a chance. You might as well go back outside and scrub your horse’s legs again, at least you’ll have the illusion you’re getting somewhere.

Focus. Talk about zen-like. While you might enjoy the pre-dawn quiet when you go outside to feed in the morning, and feel focused in that moment, it is nothing like the focus your child has on the new Mutant Ninja Turtle Slime Car�. In fact, this is a true instance of the wonder that having a child can inspire, as in, “I wonder what kind of substance the inventor of the Mutant Ninja Turtles� was using when he came up with those toys?”

Effective rewards. We have all used different kinds of rewards with our horses, with generally good results. You might unsaddle him immediately after a particularly good jumping round, or give him a carrot for walking right on the trailer. These rewards pale in effectiveness, though, to the precious words your child can hold out to you: “I love you.” When Jack wrapped his little arms around my neck, gently head-butted me and declared “I love you so hard,” I went all misty and found myself saying “What do you want, Jack? Anything, just name it�”

It’s easy to see that there is a lot of training and behavior modification going on at my farm, these days. Some of it is even directed at the horses.

Budgetary and decision-making skills. Here is another area in which your horse experience will really help you to be an effective parent. Anyone who has kept and shown horses on a shoestring will be well-equipped to meet the budgetary challenges of parenting. For example, you already know that much of what you need can be found at the dollar store. This is still true, and the few exceptions to this rule, such as saddles and bassinets, can be found on eBay for a fraction of their original price. Now all you need is a horseless teenage girl who is willing to watch your child(ren) while you ride, in exchange for some horse time. It seems as if it could go so smoothly.

However, it is likely that chaos will rear its ugly head while you are at the barn, and the kids will do something like dump a ten-pound box of laundry soap on the carpet. If the teenage girl is a true young horsewoman she will step up and handle the situation, because she knows that it’s not half as bad as the time the neighbor’s colt flipped over in the trailer.

Which brings us to what is possibly the most important application of all your horse experience: The calm and conviction that results from knowing Things Could Be Much Worse. Ordinary people watch afternoon talk shows to fulfill this human impulse to look for situations that make their lives calm by comparison. Horsepeople do it by attending the occasional late-night auction (which invariably makes you feel better about the horses you’ve got at home), or by recalling times when serenity dissolved into chaos with the aid of our favorite companion species. Fortunately for us, our horses give us lots of opportunity to reflect on how Things Could Be Much Worse.