User:BerghWassen2070

Is the best thing for young children like toddlers to go barefoot? Some experts now believe that the wearing of shoes in early childhood can actually hamper the development of a child's ability to walk and even a child's cerebral development.

Walking barefoot helps to develop the muscles and ligaments of the child's feet because there is literally more feedback from the ground when barefooted as opposed to wearing cushioned shoes to protect feet which can literally disconnect them from the ground.I am not advocating that children never wear shoes only that when it is appropriate to do so a child should learn to walk barefooted.

Podiatrists specialising in young children's feet such as Tracey Byrne, believe that the wearing of shoes interferes with a child's ability to learn to walk in the formative stages of early development. If a child is barefoot they can feel the ground and receive the necessary feedback in a tactile manner by feeling the ground underfoot. Shoes can often unbalance a toddler learning to walk because they then feel the need to look down and visually check whereas the natural urge for toddlers is to keep their head up when walking and to look where they are going. Same for adults I believe. Walking barefoot can also help to strengthen the arches of the feet, help contribute toward development of good posture and is very important for the improvement of proprioception, the peripheral awareness of what we are doing and where we are in relation to our vicinity, kind of like spacial awareness.

Shoes are an integral part of our everyday lives and it seems unusual to not wear shoes but we must remember that no one was born wearing shoes. Shoes should be used to protect our feet but should not be worn to the detriment of our feet. For young children this is especially true as their feet are not fully formed. A child's foot at birth does not even contain any bones just cartilage which over time, a few years in fact,ossifies and becomes solid bone to make up the 28 bones in the human foot.

The trends in recent years for barefoot running and the benefits it can have to prevent injury only reinforce the argument for going barefooted and the importance of not being hindered by shoes in your development in formative years as you learn to walk. This article does not endorse the abandonment of shoes but does raise the point that maybe we should not always wear shoes when we do not need to protect the soles of our feet. 安全　靴