The Telegraph – Victoria Ward
” It is one of the perils of going back to school, causing equal anguish for both parent and child. But 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.”(more)