Going barefoot is an option

Obviously wear shoes if you want to; this is an unimportant post about an option we’ve explored.

My family doesn’t wear shoes outdoors as much as is standard in US cities. It started with Jeff, who always had knee pain and found that being barefoot helped him walk in a way that didn’t hurt him. 

Our kids didn’t wear shoes much as babies and toddlers, except for warmth. This is mostly just because we all find it easier. As they got older they’ve had different preferences; currently they often choose to wear shoes or sandals outdoors.

Don’t you step on glass?

Surprisingly, no? Jeff has gotten some (and does way more barefoot walking than the rest of us), but the kids and I have never gotten hurt across about 25 person-summers.

I was worried about this when Jeff started walking to work barefoot in a neighborhood where there was sometimes glass or metal on the sidewalks. The compromise was that he carried first aid supplies in case he needed them. Over time he got a few glass splinters that were easily removed; the one time any of us had glass that was actually hard to remove was from inside our own house.

When we moved near a bike path that had a decent amount of broken glass around it, I figured we would have the kids wear shoes there. But over time we haven’t prioritized this, and it hasn’t been a problem. (One of the kids says they were hurt when they were much younger, but we think this may be a confabulated memory since nobody else remembers this happening.)

What’s the upside?

• Convenient to just walk outside with fewer steps to get ready.
• Fewer battles with kids about putting on their shoes. 
• Especially in spring it feels fresh and free to me, like driving with the car windows open.
• For some kinds of climbing/scrambling, it’s easier to climb if you can fully bend your foot.
• No wet shoes/socks if the kids get wet.

Actual dangers

• In areas with poor sanitation and warm winters (like many low-income countries, or San Francisco) there may be parasites that can infect you via your feet. 
• Last summer there were starting to be more hypodermic needles left around in our town. If this continues, we’ll probably start requiring our kids to wear closed-toed shoes.
• This seems like a bad idea if you’re diabetic or have some other reason a foot injury would be especially bad.

More minor downsides

• Maybe the kids cause more wear on their joints by heel-striking without the padding of shoes. One study indicates that children who habitually go barefoot are more likely to heel-strike when running than children who habitually wear shoes. It’s unclear to me if heel striking is actually a significant problem.
• If we go out without shoes and later decide we want to go into a public building, the building usually requires shoes and most of us are unwilling to push that rule. (Jeff is happier to push this one than the rest of us.) But we usually know when leaving the house if we’re going to a store/library/subway or just out for a walk.
• Compared to wearing shoes and removing them at the door, bare feet do bring somewhat more dirt into the house. But not as much as shoes with tread.
• The kids stub their toes more often. Play at the park is sometimes interrupted by someone scraping their toe on the pavement and needing to go home to clean it up. (This isn’t beyond the usual range of kids generally scraping knees or elbows while playing.) The kids prefer to wear close-toed sandals or shoes for kicking a ball.
• In hot weather, black pavement can be painfully hot. Jeff suggests that if preverbal kids are barefoot on a hot day, it’s good for the parent to be barefoot too and notice when pavement is too hot.
• Some surfaces like rough blacktop are uncomfortable to walk on, especially in the spring when our feet are more tender after wearing shoes all winter.
• If the kids go out in cold weather and don’t bring shoes with them at all, they often regret it. We sometimes carry shoes with us, or require them to bring shoes with them, if we think they’re likely to be uncomfortable and complain a lot.
• Sometimes we step in dog poop. Not as often as I would have guessed, maybe once a year?
• Other children see our kids barefoot and ask their parents why they can’t be barefoot too. I feel fine with different families having different policies, but it obviously causes some discontent among the other families because we’ve weakened the “everyone wears shoes” norm. But I’m not going to make my kids do something none of us think is important just so that we don’t create discontent among the ranks in other families.

Non-problems

While shoes used to be considered useful for structure, over the last few decades medical thinking is that young kids will develop healthier feet if they’re barefoot or wearing flexible-soled shoes.

I’ve heard claims that going barefoot leads to fallen arches / flat feet. This is false; children who habitually go barefoot are less likely to have flat feet.

Getting cold for a while doesn’t cause a serious problem in most weather. The other week in cold weather my three-year-old decided to take off her shoes, and later her coat. I knew she wouldn’t get dangerously or miserably cold, so I let her experiment. After about 7 minutes she had enough and put everything back on.