Some of the best parts of my childhood happened without shoes on. Running around the garden at dusk, feet on grass, on brick paving still warm from the afternoon sun. It wasn’t entirely idyllic. One night my brother kicked a shovel someone had left lying in the dark and spent the next several days in hospital. So let’s concede the obvious point up front: shoes exist for a reason, and that reason is that the ground is full of things you would rather not stand on.

Still, the occasional stubbed toe isn’t really what’s at stake here. What matters more is what happens to a foot that spends its entire developmental window inside a shoe, cushioned and supported and told it doesn’t need to do much for itself.

There’s a decent body of published research on this, and most of it points the same direction. There’s also a finding or two pointing the other way, which I’ll cover as well, because an article that only reports the convenient results isn’t worth reading.

 

Is Going Barefoot Good for Kids?

Your foot is a more sophisticated piece of equipment than most people give it credit for. Twenty-six bones, thirty-three joints, and well over a hundred muscles, tendons and ligaments, all packed into something you generally think about only when it hurts. The sole is also one of the densest sources of sensory information in the body, constantly feeding your brain details about the surface underneath you and where you are in space.

Like everything else in the musculoskeletal system, it develops in response to what it’s asked to do. A foot that has to grip, balance, splay and adapt to uneven ground builds the strength and coordination to manage those demands. A foot that spends its days on flat, cushioned surfaces inside a supportive shoe has less reason to.

For children this matters more than it does for adults, because the structure is still being laid down. Arch height, toe alignment and the basic movement patterns a child will carry for decades are all shaped during childhood. Adults can certainly improve their foot strength, but children are building the thing in the first place.

Are Shoes Harmful for Kids?

Not inherently, and it’s worth being clear about that before anyone throws out the school shoes. A well-fitted shoe worn for part of the day is fine. What the research raises questions about is near-constant use of stiff, cushioned, narrow footwear through the years when the foot is forming.

Three things appear to be going on.

  • An arch support does the job the arch muscles would otherwise do, and muscles that aren’t asked to work don’t develop as strongly.
  • A narrow toe box stops the toes spreading the way they naturally would when the foot takes load.
  • And a thick, cushioned sole dampens the sensory feedback the brain relies on to organise balance, so less information reaches the system trying to learn.

What the Data Shows Us

This is where it gets interesting, because the research on children’s feet is more substantial than most people realise.

The most widely cited study is Rao and Joseph’s 1992 survey in the Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, which examined the footprints of 2,300 children aged four to thirteen. Flat foot occurred in 8.6% of the children who wore shoes, compared with 2.8% of those who didn’t. It was most common in children wearing closed-toe shoes, less common in those wearing sandals or slippers, and least common of all in the unshod.

More recently, Hollander and colleagues published a study in Scientific Reports in 2017 comparing the foot shape of 810 habitually barefoot children and adolescents against shod counterparts matched for age, sex and ethnicity. Habitual footwear use was associated with measurable differences in foot structure across every age group, including reduced arch and hallux (big toe) angles.

The same research group then looked at what this means for how children actually move. Their 2018 study in Frontiers in Pediatrics tested children and adolescents aged six to eighteen across South Africa and Germany. Habitually barefoot children aged six to ten performed better on balance testing and the standing long jump than their shoed peers.

Then in 2022, a randomised controlled trial published in Gait & Posture followed children aged nine to twelve across two ten-week school terms. The group wearing moderate minimalist shoes finished with better balance, greater toe flexor strength and longer forward jump distances than the control group.

 

Benefits to Your Child Going Barefoot

Feet That Do Their Own Work

Muscles adapt to demand. That principle underpins essentially all strength training, and it applies to the small intrinsic muscles inside the foot just as much as to anything you’d load up in a gym. Barefoot walking asks those muscles to support the arch, grip the surface and stabilise the ankle on every single step. Supportive footwear takes over a good portion of that work, and across years of near-constant wear, the difference turns up in the arch measurements described above.

Better Balance and Coordination

Balance depends less on the foot itself than on the quality of information reaching the brain, and a large share of that information travels up through the soles of the feet. Putting a thick foam sole between the sensor and the ground reduces the quality of that signal.

This is the part of the barefoot argument that interests me most as a chiropractor, especially for children, because the same principle sits underneath a lot of what we do. How well the body knows where it is determines how well it can organise itself. Children barefoot on grass, sand, gravel and tiles receive a constant stream of varied input into that system, at exactly the age when it’s learning fastest.

Movement Patterns That Form Properly

Watch a child run barefoot across grass and then across gravel. The gait changes: shorter steps, softer landings, more attention paid to what’s underneath. That adaptability is a skill, and it develops through practice on surfaces that actually demand something.

A child who only ever moves on flat, even ground in cushioned shoes gets a narrower range of practice. Normal, varied movement is what builds a healthy musculoskeletal system, and feet are where that starts.

The Drawbacks

Now for the other side, which most articles on this topic move past rather quickly.

Injuries happen. Glass, splinters, bindis, gravel, and the occasional shovel left lying in the dark. The risk is real, and it’s the entire reason footwear was invented.

Australian ground gets hot. Asphalt, sand and paving can reach temperatures that cause serious burns on a summer afternoon in Perth. Barefoot in February is a shaded grass and indoors proposition rather than an all-conditions policy.

Feet get sunburnt. The tops of feet are the most reliably missed patch in the national sunscreen routine, and they burn just as well as anything else.

Public surfaces are worth some caution. Shared changing rooms, public pools and communal wet areas are all reasonable places to keep thongs on.

Transitioning too fast causes problems. This applies more to adults and teenagers than to young children, but a foot that’s been supported for years won’t adapt overnight. Going from cushioned trainers to minimal footwear inside a week is a reliable way to irritate the Achilles or plantar fascia, and it’s the most common reason people try barefoot and conclude it doesn’t suit them.

None of this argues against barefoot time. It argues for sensible barefoot time: more of it, in environments where the ground isn’t actively hostile.

Ready To Free The Feet?

Feet are built to do a job, and they develop best when they’re allowed to do it. The research on children’s feet is reasonably consistent. Growing up with more barefoot time is associated with better arch development, better balance and stronger feet.

The practical version isn’t complicated. Let them be barefoot at home, on the grass, at the beach and on whatever safe and varied surfaces you can find. Put shoes on for hot ground, rough ground and school, because most schools give you no choice. It’s encouraging that a number of Australian schools and early learning centres have started introducing barefoot policies for exactly these reasons.

And if you have concerns about how your child stands, walks or moves, that’s worth looking at properly. There’s a lot to learn from watching how a child actually loads and moves through their feet, hips and spine, which tells you considerably more than looking at a foot standing still.

Book an assessment at Lamp Chiropractic if you’d like us to take a look at how your child is moving.