Is Being Barefoot Better for Children?
Better balance and jumping ability found in children who were barefoot more often.
After having a baby there are certain essential items you must buy to prepare for caring for an infant. Diapers, bottles, and pacifiers are just a few items parents pick up for their new born, and as the child ages so do their needs, before you know it you're buying highchairs, and often, when the child begins to walk, shoes. It's interesting to see children so young wearing big bulky shoes, especially when most children fight having to wear them. A new study suggests that having your child be mostly barefoot through childhood could improve their physical performance, especially in the category of jumping and balance.
A study published in Frontiers in Pediatrics followed 810 primary and secondary school children from 22 different schools in South Africa and Germany. They had the children perform a variety of physical tests including balance, standing long jump, and 20 m sprint. They found the children who were normally found barefoot performed much better in the balance and long jump category, but the children who often wore athletic shoes performed better in the sprint. There needs to be more research into why this is the case, one reason may be the surfaces the children were asked to perform the tasks on. These results enforced the hypothesis that adolescent children would benefit from being barefoot more often especially in the 6-10 year old range, where the difference in score was significantly higher. There still needs to be more studies and the studies should use a more uniformed approach to testing their participants.
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