The truth about the best baby shoes and why ours went in the trash

It was a Tuesday morning, probably around 9 AM, and I was sitting on our living room rug wearing black yoga pants that featured a very distinct, crusted-over smear of smashed avocado on the left knee. Maya was ten months old at the time. I was sweating through my t-shirt because I had just spent a solid fourteen minutes trying to jam her chubby, aggressively curling little toes into a pair of miniature, stiff, gold leather high-tops.

I bought them off an Instagram ad for like fifty bucks. They were supposedly the absolute greatest thing you could put on a new walker. They had these thick rubber soles and tiny white laces and they looked exactly like adult sneakers but shrunk down by a shrink ray.

So I finally get the left shoe on. I get the right shoe on. I stand her up next to the coffee table. She looks down at her feet like I've just encased them in blocks of cement.

She lets go of the table. She tries to take one single, triumphant step toward me.

And she immediately face-plants directly into the carpet.

My husband, who was currently drinking his third espresso of the morning and actively ignoring the laundry basket I had placed strategically in the middle of the hallway so he would trip over it and maybe fold something, just watched the whole thing happen. He took a sip of his coffee and said, "I don't think she likes the gold boots, Sar."

No crap, Mark. Obviously.

That time I thought my kid was broken

So I completely panicked, naturally. I thought something was structurally wrong with her ankles. I thought she was going to be one of those kids who needed special orthopedic inserts because when she stood up in her bare feet, her feet were completely, totally flat. Like little pancakes slapped onto the rug.

I called our pediatrician, Dr. Aris. I hauled her into the office the next day, dragging the stupid gold sneakers in my diaper bag to show him what she kept falling over in. I sat on that crinkly paper on the exam table while Maya tried to eat a wooden tongue depressor, and I rambled for five minutes about arch support and ankle stability.

Dr. Aris is this very calm, older guy who has probably seen ten thousand hysterical first-time moms just like me. He gently took the gold sneaker out of my hand, felt the bottom of it, and basically laughed at me.

He told me I should throw them in the trash.

Apparently, when babies are born, their feet aren't even made of real hard bones yet. It's just this squishy mass of cartilage that slowly turns into actual bone over the first like, five years of their life, which is honestly kind of horrifying if you think about it too much. Squishy cartilage blobs! So if you cram those soft little blobs into rigid, stiff shoes because you think they need "support," you can actually end up squashing their developing feet and causing weird toe deformities later on.

Oh god. I had basically been trying to foot-bind my ten-month-old.

And the flat foot thing? Also totally normal. Dr. Aris explained they just have a giant fat pad in the middle of their foot that hides their arch. It's just fat. They don't need arch support, they just need to burn off the foot fat by walking.

The sensory thing and being basically feral

So the medical advice was literally just: let them be barefoot. Barefoot is best. Period.

There was something Dr. Aris mentioned about nerve endings, too. The soles of their feet are packed with nerves, and they need to actually feel the texture of the carpet or the hardwood floor so their brain can figure out where they're in space. If you put them in stiff soles, they can't feel the floor, so they don't know how to balance, and they just fall over. Like Maya did. Face-first.

So we just stopped trying. We went full feral.

Maya spent the next three months crawling and cruising around the house completely barefoot. I used to dress her in this Flutter Sleeve Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit we got from Kianao. Which, okay, honest moment: trying to snap those tiny bottom buttons when your baby is doing a full alligator death-roll on the changing table is absolute hell. But the organic cotton is incredibly soft, and she looked like this adorable, feral little woodland fairy zooming around the kitchen with her bare toes splayed out wide like a tree frog.

She learned to walk so much faster once I just let her feet do their thing. No shoes, no problem.

Oh, and grip socks? Fine for tile floors I guess, but honestly they just end up pulled half off and flopping around the ankle like a deflated balloon within ten minutes anyway, so whatever. Skip 'em.

But what about outside (and the park dirt)

This is where I got really confused, though. Because obviously, you can't just let your kid walk barefoot in the grocery store or at the city park where there might be broken glass or hot pavement. I mean, you can, but someone will probably call child services on you, and also, gross.

Before she was really walking well on her own, if we went to the park, I just wouldn't let her walk on the actual ground. I’d bring our Polar Bear Organic Cotton Blanket and just plop her on that under a tree.

A quick warning about that blanket, by the way. I love it because it's massive and the organic cotton is so breathable and soft, but I bought the light blue one. Do you know what happens to a light blue blanket when a baby who has been crawling in park dirt decides to aggressively pat it with muddy hands? It looks like a crime scene. It washes out perfectly fine in the machine, thank god, but maybe get a darker color if you're taking it to a muddy park. Anyway, the point is, I just kept her contained.

But eventually, she was really walking. Like, toddler-running. And she needed actual shoes for the outside world. Finding great baby shoes for the outdoors without ruining their feet became my new obsession.

Explore our organic baby clothes and baby blankets for more organic and sustainable baby products.

The taco test and other things I learned the hard way

If you've to buy a physical shoe for your kid to wear outside, it needs to be as close to being barefoot as legally possible.

I learned this trick from a pediatric physical therapist on TikTok (because obviously that's where I get all my parenting information now, at 2 AM while eating stale Goldfish crackers in bed). It's called the Taco Test.

If you pick up a baby shoe in Target, you should be able to fold the toe all the way back to the heel with one hand. It should fold completely in half. Like a cheap street taco. If you can't bend it easily, it's too stiff. Put it back.

I swear some of these baby brands just shrink down a men's heavy-duty construction boot, slap a dinosaur on the side, and charge you sixty bucks for it. The soles are like rigid plastic. NEVER buy those.

You also want a toe box that looks ridiculously wide. Like clown shoes. Babies splay their toes out wide to balance, so if the front of the shoe comes to a cute little point, it's squishing their toes together. And no heel lift. Completely flat from front to back.

And velcro. Only velcro. Anyone who puts actual tie-laces on a shoe meant for a squirming 14-month-old is a sadist who has never actually met a child.

Sizing is a nightmare

Did you know a toddler's foot grows like a half size every two or three months? It's absurd. You will spend half your disposable income on shoes they wear for twelve weeks.

But the biggest mistake I made at first was measuring Maya's foot while she was sitting down in her high chair. I bought a size 3, shoved it on her foot, and she screamed for twenty minutes.

When they stand up, their entire foot flattens and spreads out under their body weight. So a foot that measures a size 3 sitting down might seriously be a size 4 when they're bearing weight on it. ALWAYS measure them standing up. You press your thumb at the top of the shoe, and you want about a thumb's width of empty space between their longest toe and the front of the shoe so they've room to grow and splay.

What Leo wore while destroying my house

By the time Leo came along three years later, I had completely given up on trying to make my kids look like tiny, fashionable adults.

Second kid energy is real. I didn't buy a single pair of shoes for him until he was literally running down the sidewalk outside our house. Inside? Totally barefoot. Always.

He practically lived in this Sleeveless Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit from Kianao. This thing is my absolute favorite piece of baby clothing I've ever owned, and I don't say that lightly. He was a very sweaty, very chunky baby, and this sleeveless onesie let him just breathe. He would run around our kitchen floor barefoot, slipping on spilled iced coffee, completely unbothered by footwear, just destroying my house in this soft, stretchy little outfit.

It survived so many washes. It never lost its shape. And his feet grew perfectly, because I just left them the hell alone.

So yeah. Save your money. Skip the expensive, stiff mini-sneakers. Let their little feet spread out and feel the ground. Buy the wide, ugly, floppy velcro shoes for the park, and for everywhere else, just embrace the barefoot feral baby phase. It's so much easier anyway.

Ready to just let them be barefoot in something incredibly soft? Check out Kianao's organic cotton baby clothes to find the perfect, breathable outfits for your little one's earliest steps.

My messy answers to your shoe questions

Do babies need shoes when learning to walk?

No! Oh my god, no. I thought they did and I was so wrong. When they're pulling up and learning to take those first wobbly steps indoors, being barefoot is genuinely the best thing for them. They need to feel the floor to balance. Shoes just get in the way and make them trip. Only put shoes on them when they're confidently walking outside on stuff that could hurt their feet.

What exactly is the taco test for footwear?

It's my favorite trick. You just pick up the shoe and try to fold the front toe section all the way back to touch the heel using just one hand. If the sole bends super easily right in half like a taco shell, it's good. If it's rigid and you've to fight it, put it back on the shelf. Their feet need to flex naturally when they walk.

Are hard sole shoes bad for toddlers?

Honestly, yeah. My pediatrician told me their bones are basically just squishy cartilage when they're babies. Stiff, hard soles can really force their soft little feet into weird shapes and mess up their natural walking pattern. You want the sole to be as thin and flexible as possible so it just mimics being barefoot.

How much space should be at the toe?

About a thumb's width! But seriously, make sure you check this while your kid is seriously standing up. If they're sitting down, their foot shrinks back a bit. Stand them up, let their weight flatten their foot out, and then press your thumb down at the very front. If their toes are touching the front edge, they're too small.

Do baby feet need arch support?

Nope. I completely panicked because Maya had totally flat feet, but it turns out all babies have flat feet. They have a fat pad right in the middle of their foot that makes it look flat, and the arch doesn't really form until they're older. Artificial arch support in baby shoes is basically just a marketing gimmick. They don't need it.