I came across this article which I must definitely share with you guys as I'm very interested to know your thoughts on this. For your convenience, I have copied the excerpts from the article here:
"...however tricky it may be to master the art of tying shoelaces, an expert has warned that parents should not take the easy way out by repeatedly buying their offspring velcro or slip-on shoes.
Ian Fieggen, who is known as Professor Shoelace, said children were getting worse at the practice because they were being allowed to avoid it. There was some research that looked into the fact that children were learning these things later in life because they were able to put them off," he said. "Parents are able to give their kids velcro shoes so they can delay these developmental milestones. "This is actually a problem because it's not just that they can't tie their shoe laces but they no longer have gone through a difficult thing to learn and found that OK, it does sometimes take a lot of work to learn something."
A report published in 2013 showed that few children had managed to learn the skill before the age of six, with many still having difficulty until the age of nine or ten when they started getting interested in sport. The findings represented a major shift in social habits. Just thirty years ago, being able to tie shoelaces was regarded as a skill to be learnt by the age of four, but changes in shoe design and footwear fashions mean the skill is no longer essential until much older.
Mr Fieggen, who has written a book on the subject called Laces and has a website dedicated to the art, acknowleged that children have different learning styles and that a technique that works for one might be too hard to grasp for another.
He advised parents who were struggling to teach their children to mark a pair of shoelaces so they know which parts need to be held and which parts need to be lined up with each other. He also suggested getting two different coloured laces to help those who struggle with left and right. "
I personally only started wearing shoes with laces in my teens years, in terms of convenience, I feel shoes without laces are far more easier to use and care for. I remembered the days of needing to take out the laces to wash the shoes and laces, scrubbing the laces hard to wash off the dirt and then threading it back.
As a parent to 3 kiddos with age range of 2 to 6.5 years old, I'm still comfortable with our kiddos wearing Velcro shoes. What more after reading articles where people get injured when their shoelaces get stuck in escalators. I guess for my stand, I'm not avoiding, just delaying until our kiddos are much more older (probably 8-9 years old?) But that's just my personal opinions.
How about you? What do you think?
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