Are House Shoes a Health Risk?
SALZBURG, Austria – Do children’s house shoes fit properly? This question was the subject of a study conducted on pre-school and elementary school children by an Austrian research team, commissioned by the Ministry for Health. The results: The smallest kids have the worst fitting shoes. Properly fitting shoes have an extra 12-17 mm of ‘wiggle room’. The research team proved in a previous study that shoe sizes are frequently misleading, so the next step was to measure the feet and house shoe sizes of 1,258 children. Measurements showed that 88% of the preschoolers tested wore too-short house shoes. Some 25% had shoes of 3 or more sizes too small, and a few kids even had house shoes up to five sizes smaller than needed. www.kinderfuesse.com/english/download.asp?lev=wort2&page=1 There are 2 reasons for this: First, most children’s shoe sizes are misleading. 98.7% of the house shoes tested were shorter than indicated, by up to 6 sizes: A shoe labeled 26 with the inside length of a size 20.
