Toddler footwear, or, yet another example of why my kids will be social outcasts
When I was a new mom, one well-meaning relative told me, after a look inside my daughter’s closet, “You know, it’s okay for kids to have more than one pair of shoes.”
But I could never understand why you’d need to have more. We were pretty happy with a couple pair: tennis shoes (winter) and sandals (summer).
So I guess I’m not the norm. Toddler footwear is “a hot market,” according to today’s The Boston Globe.
Sneakers for infants and toddlers are the fastest growing segment in athletic footwear, with sales over the past three years soaring 34 percent to $1.35 billion in 2007. . . . Sales for adults grew just 3.5 percent over the same period.
Both New Balance and Reebok say that their new marketing campaigns for toddler sneakers are geared toward moms.
“For the most part, the mother is still making the buying decision, but she’s more influenced by her children than ever before,” said Neil Hernberg, head of Reebok’s kids division.
Gee, I wonder what would cause a mom to be influenced by her child when it comes to shoe purchases? Could it be that kids are somehow influenced by New Balance’s multimillion dollar sponsorship deal with Sesame Street? Or the ads on Nickelodeon during the Nick Jr. programming? Geared toward moms? Please.
The race to lace up toddlers makes sense [ed. note: debatable] because they need new shoes more often for their growing feet and parents are willing to spend more on children than on themselves, retail analysts say. Moreover, brand loyalty can begin at the earliest of ages.
Unethical marketing? Well, trying to impress kids with a brand when they are toddlers so they’ll want to buy later is pretty darn creepy, in a manchurian-candidate kind of way.
And one other tiny little issue: the best thing for growing toddler feet? Go barefoot whenever possible.
Parents beleaguered by the high cost of children’s footwear may be relieved to hear that, in the opinion of many orthopedists, the best thing for growing feet is not that pair of adorable, miniaturized glow-in-the-dark running shoes . . . but rather no shoes at all.
(Granted, it’s almost twenty-year-old research, but I challenge the shoe-product industry to come up with anything more recent that contradicts this.)
Photo courtesy lumkness
June 19th, 2008 at 9:36 am
I noticed the ads for New Balance after Sesame Street recently. Just yesterday I had a relative try to give me a pair of sneakers with Elmo and Cookie Monster all over them. I said, as politely as possible, “thanks but no thanks.”
My 16-month-old son has one pair of generic sneakers for when it’s chilly and one pair of knock-off “crocs” for play. And he only wears the crocs when we go to a playground or somewhere where I’m afraid he might step on something sharp. My prefers to go barefoot whenever possible. In fact, he usually fights me when I try to put shoes on him.
June 19th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Kids need nice shoes if they’re going to attend all their pets’ weddings.
June 21st, 2008 at 6:23 am
@vaquera: That’s exactly what the docs said in the research I read — protecting the feet is the only reason kids need to wear shoes. And you bring up a great question: how do you respond to well-meaning friends and relatives in this situation? Was your polite “no, thank you” offensive?
@Mark: They wouldn’t wear tennis shoes, silly, they’d wear high heels.
June 23rd, 2008 at 10:28 am
@ Lisa: Sorry for my delayed response… The sneakers were hand-me-downs from her own son that she was offering to me so it was easy to come up with some excuse. I think I told her I already had several pairs on that size so she could pass them on to someone else who needed them. If they had been offered brand-new as a gift outright I probably would have smiled and said “thank you” then proceeded to take them to the Goodwill drop-off.