Washington - On a warm day, my husband and I walked with our three boys to the playground down the street from our house.
As soon as we arrived, all three of our little boys immediately shed their shoes and socks, and took off.
They ran fast, climbed easily, using their feet to wrap around the poles they scaled, clearly delighted. It wasn't long before a few other children at the playground caught on and attempted to remove their shoes and socks.
“No!” one mother shouted. “Don't remove your shoes and socks,” she told her son. When he whined and asked why not, she simply stated: “We always keep our shoes on outside.”
It made me wonder why so many parents of young children forbid them from taking off their shoes outdoors. I decided to research the myths and benefits of going barefoot, and what I found out may surprise you.
Two common reasons parents give for not allowing their children to go barefoot outside include fear of injury to the foot, and fear of picking up some unsavoury disease or illness through their feet.
Unless you are in the city, where there is broken glass everywhere, the likelihood of injuring one's foot is minimal.
Both children and adults who go barefoot frequently also have a heightened sense of their surroundings and can easily spot a sharp object they need to avoid. Children's feet also toughen up the more they go barefoot, leading to more natural protection.
As far as picking up an illness or disease from going barefoot, our skin is designed to keep pathogens out, and you are far more likely to spread or contract an illness through your hands (think public doorknobs, sinks, keyboards and hand rails) where germs are most plentiful.
Also, children are much more likely to put their hands - not their feet - in their mouths and touch their faces and eyes, where disease or illness most commonly enters the body.
Parasites are not likely to be transmitted through the foot in a developed country. Since the advent of modern plumbing, hookworm is less common. A child is now more likely to contract a mosquito- or tick-borne illness than a parasite.
In fact, shoes actually create an opportunity for illness by trapping bacteria and fungus (along with the darkness, heat and moisture) and holding them against your feet, establishing an ideal environment for the growth of icky things like athlete's foot and toe fungus.
Kevin Geary, parenting guru, teacher and author of Revolutionary Parent, a site dedicated to raising physically and psychologically healthy kids, argues that shoes are actually quite bad for children.
Shoes destroy feet, preventing proper toe spread, which interferes with the foot's ability to function properly, and prevent proper movement development, which can make children more susceptible to foot and lower leg injury.
However, the benefits of going barefoot are plentiful.
One major benefit is that it strengthens the feet and lower legs, making the body more agile and less prone to injury. It also enhances proprioception, the sense of the relative position of neighbouring parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. In other words, going barefoot helps a child develop body awareness.
Geary explains that the nerves in our feet are sensitive (the sole of your foot has over 200 000 nerve endings - one of the highest concentrations in the entire body) for this very reason; they make us safer, more careful, and better able to adapt to the ground beneath us.
When barefoot, we are better able to climb, cut, pivot, balance and adjust rapidly when the ground shifts beneath us, as it does when we walk on uneven terrain, or anything besides concrete and pavement.
Another benefit of going barefoot is that it encourages a natural, healthy gait.
And finally, going barefoot is a joy to the senses, especially to young children who experience all the newness of the tactile world around them.
Think of the relaxing feeling of walking on soft warm sand at the beach; the refreshing feeling of cool dewy grass in the early morning of a summer day; the feeling of slippery wet mud squishing between toes in the garden; the feeling of the rough bark when climbing a tree; and the surprise at the splash of a puddle underfoot.
All of these sensations are available when we allow our children to experience a bit of shoe-free time.
Perhaps you should kick off those shoes at the playground or in the backyard. Enjoy your feet and what they were made for.
Washington Post