The Other Right Foot

Troy has a pair of dinosaur house shoes that he likes to wear all the time. He has no issues getting them and putting them on his feet himself. What he does have an issue with is putting them on the correct feet. I’ve always wondered why all kids will inevitably put their shoes on the wrong feet.

Parents and experts agree (without any scientific facts to back it up) that it comes down to a few possible reasons. A child is still learning about left and right…and wrong and right. To a child, they are just shoes; they have no “direction.” They simply pick up a shoe and put it on a foot. Someone once said that if there’s a 50/50 chance involved, a child will pick the wrong choice 90% of the time. If we go by that logic, then it makes complete sense. To add a little physiology to the mix, a child’s foot is still developing and forming an arch. So, technically their feet are flatter and straighter than an adult’s, and they simply don’t feel the discomfort that we’d feel.

A child also has no frame of reference as to what is the correct foot for that shoe, unless we tell them. Left and right are not innate or intuitive concepts. They are knowledge. Just like a child had to learn language by hearing and observing, or learn to recognize numbers and colors, or learn how to understand and navigate the world around them by being guided; so too must they learn the knowledge of left and right…both for feet and shoes. It’s funny how we will go to great lengths and repetition to teach them some things, but take for granted others. Putting the correct shoe on the correct foot is so subconscious for most of us that we don’t even think about it anymore. It’s like breathing. And we just assume that it will be that way for our kid too.

So, to help Troy have a visual concept to go by, I told him that the dinosaurs should be facing each other, so that they could say “Hello” to one another. This seemed to help put the pieces together for him. That is unless the dinosaurs have a falling out, get angry, and aren’t talking to each other that day (true story). Or until my wife buys new shoes that don’t have characters on them for Troy to use to make the visual connection.