Put on Your Own Shoes Day

What the day is

Put on Your Own Shoes Day is observed on December 6. It reads as filler, and underneath it sit both a real developmental milestone and a genuinely interesting piece of physics.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented.

Dressing yourself is one of the standard milestones of early childhood, and shoes are among the last parts of it to come right. Children generally manage to get shoes on well before they manage to get them on the correct feet, and laces arrive considerably later, because the movement requires two hands doing different things at the same time. The usual adult instinct, which is to take over because it is faster, is the thing that delays it.

The lace question turned out to be a real research problem. A study published in 2017 filmed shoelace knots failing on a treadmill and found that the mechanism is not gradual slippage at all. The impact of each footfall deforms the knot while the swinging leg applies inertial force to the free ends, and the knot survives many cycles almost unchanged and then comes apart within a couple of steps.

The same work points at a fix that most people have never been told. The common bow is a granny knot, produced by tying the second loop the same way round as the first. It sits crooked and slips easily. Reversing the direction of that second step gives a square knot, which sits straight across the shoe and holds far better for no extra effort.

How to take part

• Check your own bow. If it sits diagonally across the shoe rather than straight across, you are tying a granny knot.
• Reverse the second loop and see how much longer it lasts.
• Let a child do their own shoes today, and start early enough that the delay does not matter.
• Leave them on the wrong feet occasionally. Children work it out faster through discomfort than through correction.
• Teach whichever lacing method the child can actually manage, not the one you were taught.