Why being barefoot has the power to change your child’s brain.
As parents we are often looking for quick and easy things to help our children develop to their optimum. Brain development in the first few years of life is so rapid, and so important, so I wanted to share with you why being barefoot is so important for your child.
Barefoot is best!
We are quick to put shoes on our children, and often the recommendations are to find shoes with arch support, and a solid heel counter. While it was probably given with good intentions, there are a few reasons why I disagree with this recommendation.
Walking barefoot allows your child’s forefoot to splay open. This means they will be able to use their toes to walk properly. You need a functional big toe to properly perform toe-off part of the gait cycle. If your child’s big toe is squished into some shoes that are tight around the forefoot, their big toe won’t be able to do it’s job even if it wanted to.
Walking barefoot allows the intrinsic muscles of the feet to get a little work out, and strengthen. This is what triggers your child’s foot arches to develop! All children have “flat feet” to some degree while their arches are developing. By placing their feet into overly supportive shoes, what happens is the foot is passively supported. The shoe support naturally creates an arch, and the intrinsic muscles of the foot never have to work. This is when you’ll end up with true flat feet in school aged children. Even if your child currently has flat feet, unless they are serious risk of injury, get them barefoot as much as possible!
Being barefoot allows your child to connect with the earth. Earthing is so important in the age of technology. Connecting with the earth has been shown to remove a lot of free radicals from the body, due to transfer of electrons. This is even more powerful when there is moving water (and why people love the ocean and waterfalls). If your child is spending much of their day at school in shoes, in front of a screen and generally nowhere near nature, they will really benefit from some barefoot play on grass or sand. You might even find it helps them sleep better too!
The final reason I love barefoot for kids is that it helps to develop the proprioceptive system. The proprioceptive nervous system’s job is to detect movement and sensations. The more movement and sensation it is exposed to, the stronger it gets. Like any nerve, you’ve got to strengthen it’s nerve connections by using it! (This is a really simplistic version but if you’re looking for more info, just google proprioception). A strong proprioceptive system enables your child to move with confidence, to understand where their body is in space, to be willing to make calculated risks with their body. The feet are a really large source of proprioception for the body – they are after all our contact with the earth – so it makes sense that they provide a lot of input to the brain.
Our brains are input based systems. They need stimulation to survive. So when you think about the kid in the classroom who can’t sit still, and wriggles all the time? Or stimming behaviours in autistic children? These are all cases of trying to stimulate their brain, and in those cases, needing more stimulation than “average”. Walking barefoot creates a huge input into the brain, with movement of the ankle and foot joints, and sensation underneath the feet. What an easy way to stimulate your child’s brain!
It isn’t realistic to be barefoot all the time. There are many shoe companies these days that are focusing on barefoot shoes for kids. The main things to look for are – a wide forefoot that doesn’t squash your child’s toes together, no rise in the heel, and a flexible sole. Babies are just fine with leather soled flexible shoes.
