STUDY: Barefoot Children Are Happier And More Intelligent Than The Ones With Shoes!


Nowadays parents take care of their children way too much. There is a study showing that the habit of taking too much care of the children can have bad impacts on their development and, despite what one thinks, barefoot children are more smart.

There are shoes called footwear for the newborns and shoes for crawling. In this short article, we´ll try to offer clinical arguments to what it is necessary to leave barefoot the non-walking babies. We used the method of analysis and critical reading of different bibliographic sources connected to the psychomotor development of the child, treatises of neurology and the main theories on the development of kid intelligence.

We discover that the physical motion and sensory stimulation of the baby through the bare feet is a factor of acceleration of growth, proprioceptive development and intellectual development of the kid.
The study was carried out at the Complutense University in Madrid.

Why are the baby feet so important?

Baby feet are a lot more sensitive than other parts of their body, until they are 8 or 9 months old. That is why in the first couple of months their feet are of the greatest importance: they inform the child of the world surrounding them, and the child keeps touching and sucking on their feet due to the fact that they have lots of nerve endings. Later on in life the skin on the feet loses this high amount of sensibility.

Continuously putting shoes on babies who do not walk denies them of tactile information and the perception of the position and movement of the feet in space, which plays an important role in the central nervous system. That is why the development of manual visual coordination and the acquisition of this tactile and perceptive info are required for the development of motor skills.

The study is also based on the Piaget intelligence advancement stages, focusing mainly on the first stage, the sensory-motor stage (that lasts from birth until the baby is two), when the control of movement and learning how to aptly organize the sensory information play important role. This is when we get the first notion of self, of space, time and the idea of cause and effect relationship.
This is why feet can contribute to the development of child intelligence, and the intelligence develops through:

1. The development of the nervous system, that is the ability to make differences and distinguish more and more stimuli which relates to the differentiation of the nerve cells.

2. The experience of interaction with the physical world, that is the manipulation and object control. It implies getting to know how the items operate using them. The intelligence advancement wouldn’t be possible without this, since the growth of the nerve system can’t be achieved without experience. Along with hands and mouth, feet play a crucial role here.

3. The need to learn. Human mind is inclined to achieving cognitive balance. Each time we experience an external stimulus we don’t understand we make an effort to figure it out. The cognitive system tends to search for new info in order to restore balance, which is why the interest in learning relates to finding increasingly complex and stable knowledge structures.

4. Ultimately babies start discovering their bodies which is when shoes begin to limit their level of sensitivity and motion. When they are 6/7 months old, infants generally put their feet in the mouth in the process of learning more about themselves and providing new sensations and motor experiences that add to the development of their intelligence.

5. In addition, supporting the bare feet at all type of surfaces, likewise the irregular ones, contributes to the advancement of the muscles. Shoes add extra weight to the feet, preventing them from moving easily. This is why children are taking their shoes off whenever they get more control over their bodies.




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