Routines vs. Schedules

At what time you eat your lunch? At what time you sleep? People usually don't have an exact time for eating or sleeping, unless you have the obsessive-compulsive disorder. Daily life is full of surprises and unexpected things that may change our usual dynamic. We need to "adapt" to these changes. People that live under the clock have very stressful lives because one of the things that really frustrates them are unexpected things that come up ALL the time. So imagine, what happens to a child living under "the clock" that was taken from his schedule, out of his environment, because a family birthday party came up? Could that child "blend in" or would feel stressed and frustrated?
If you put your child under a strict schedule, you are not preparing your child for life. Yes, we all have some type of schedule at work, or in school, but we usually decide when we eat or when to sleep. We eat because our body asks for food with an unconfortable feeling that we name hunger. If you have a healthy lifestyle, usually you'll feel hungry almost at the same time every day. We all have our own biological timing, and we should respect that timing in our children.
But, how we get our children to sleep or to eat? There's a theory I don't like so much in Psychology, but it's very useful if we apply it nicely: Behaviorism and its conditionist theory. We are all conditioned to certain things, because this is the way all animals learn. For every action, there's a reaction. We can "condition" our children to fall asleep when we want to with previous stimulations that lead the child to sleep. That's when we apply a "ROUTINE". We lead our child through activities. This stables children's minds because they love to know what's coming up. But we need to also give the tools to our children to adapt to changes. For example, everyday your child wakes up, eats, takes a bath, plays with his toys or goes to a daycare, comes back, has a meal, but you need to take your child to a friend's house. So you take him. When you come back home, you "conditionate" your child to go to sleep by a "Sleeping Routine". A Sleeping Routine may include a nice bath, a massage, soft music, low lights, and before you notice, the child is sleeping. Even though your child was taken out from what he's used to do, he can follow a routine that reorganizes his mind.
A tip I can give to newborns' parents is that don't put curtains in baby's room. Baby's need to know when day and night is. Melatonin is a hormone that regulates our biological clock. This hormone reacts to sunlight. If you keep your child when sleeping the curtains closed, baby's melatonine won't regulate.

Timing for our bodies and brains is important, but timing in the sense of schedule may cause stress. You as a parent will choose what suits better for your lifestyle, but routines are a way to give your child the oportunity to auto-regulate and adapt to life in a more natural way.
Using routines made my life very easy as a parent. I slept my children today, both of them at the same time. We never fight over sleeping time. It's something that happens "naturally", but it's really conditioned.