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- Should Kids Wear Shoes?
Childhood development is obviously a popular topic. Parents are always interested in how to best optimize the health and performance of their children. This is a topic I’m sure we will return to, but we figured we would start from the ground up, literally. The issue of shoes and foot/motor pattern development is something Jason and I have spoken about for years. So we thought in this episode of the podcast/newsletter, we would dive in to some the research about shoes for kids, and give our thoughts as we raise kids of our own.
We begin by looking at this study where the authors looked at the differences in foot characteristics between children who wear shoes and children who have never worn shoes. The findings suggest that wearing shoes in early childhood can be detrimental to the development of a normal longitudinal arch in the foot and may promote bunion formation.
This next study looked at the effect of wearing shoes on certain gait parameters (walking). The study concluded that walking with shoes led to a more flexed posture of the foot and an increase in knee varus (knee bowing).
This study looked at the effects of foot muscle activity in children when wearing shoes. The results suggested that wearing shoes significantly altered the activity of foot muscles when walking.
Finally, we looked at this study which found that children who typically go barefoot had significantly better jumping and balancing skills compared to those who habitually wear shoes.
The reason for these findings have to do with understanding sensory information and how your brain processes it. IF you Google “sensory homunculus model” you will see a human figure with a giant face and lips, hands, and feet. What this is representing is how sensory information is represented in your brain. Your face and lips have a large amount of brain devoted to it from a sensory point of view. Your hands are number 2 in terms of amount of brain representation for sensory information. The number 3 part of your body is your feet. There is a large amount of brain devoted to picking up sensory information through your feet.
The issue arises when you take this number 3 sensory organ and stuff it in a dark, cushioned devise all day. Then your nerves and muscles are not getting a lot of stimulation in order to properly develop. Your body feeds off of the information from our world coming in and our body developing in response to it. This is why you can see so many postural and muscular changes in response to not wearing shoes.
Simplified Takeaways…
There are a decent number of studies (see above) that show that wearing shoes alters normal foot development and biomechanics in a developing child.
This has to do with your feet being responsible for bringing in sensory information from the world for proper development.
If a child is in shoes constantly, then you are blunting the child’s ability to properly process this sensory information and develop muscularly as well as develop good motor patterns.
Obviously, the role of shoes in preventing injury from stepping on glass, nails, etc. can’t be neglected.
In a developing child, give them time to experience the world barefoot in order to get this sensory information into their system. Just use good judgement when it comes to safety.
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