| April 2009 | Poor little feet: Are house shoes a health risk? | |||
  |
Do children’s house shoes fit properly? This question was the subject of a study conducted on pre-school and elementary school children by an Austrian research team, commissioned by the Ministry for Health. The results: The smallest kids have the worst fitting shoes.
Properly fitting shoes have an extra 12-17 mm of ‘wiggle room’. The research team proved in a previous study that shoe sizes are frequently misleading, so the next step was to measure the feet and house shoe sizes of 1,258 children. Measurements showed that 88% of the preschoolers tested wore too-short house shoes. Some 25% had shoes of 3 or more sizes too small, and a few kids even had house shoes up to five sizes smaller than needed. http://www.kinderfuesse.com/english/download.asp?lev=wort2&page=1 There are 2 reasons for this: First, most children’s shoe sizes are misleading. 98.7% of the house shoes tested were shorter than indicated, by up to 6 sizes: A shoe labeled 26 with the inside length of a size 20. Second, many parents aren’t aware of the importance of properly fitting house shoes. While 90% of parents surveyed consider the fit of street shoes to be “important”, only 62% feel the same about house shoes. A serious mistake: Because kids in Austria and Germany wear house shoes in school and kindergarten, they spend a lot more time in them than in street shoes, and too-small house shoes damage kids’ feet. The researchers recommend checking the fit of house shoes regularly, measuring both the feet and the inside shoe length, using either a cardboard template or with the innovative measuring tool developed by the research team: the plus12. This clever device automatically adds the extra 12 mm needed for a healthy fit. http://www.kinderfuesse.com/english/download.asp?lev=wort2&page=3 |
|||
|
||||
