Tips for Helping Your Child Tie Shoes
How can you teach your child to tie shoes?
Tying shoes is a complex self-care tasks that requires adequate visual motor skills, fine motor-coordination, task sequencing, and motor planning. Most kids learn to tie their shoes around age 6, but this can take longer due to the complexity of the task as well as environmental factors such as lack of exposure to shoes with laces (hello Arizona temps and sandals!).
Here are 5 creative tips to help your child learn how to tie their shoes:
- Start with longer, different colored laces on each side
- Practice with shoes on table or floor first as reaching the foot can increase difficulty
- Demonstrate tying next to child with shoes facing the same direction.
- Choose one method to teach and share which method with all caregivers working on the skill for consistency.
- Practice tying things other than shoe laces such as a jump rope around the waist, ribbons around dolls, aprons, etc.
At Kids Place Pediatric Therapy, we use Occupational Therapy to help kids learn how to tie their shoes. We have four locations throughout Arizona and are eager to help kids get back to playing better, feeling better, and living better. Contact us today to set up a complimentary screen!
