The Washington Post has a piece today about the return of young children to school after a year and a half at home due to the pandemic. Mostly it's about socialization, with teachers saying that kids are more fidgety, more likely to get into minor scuffles on the playground, and less able to make connections with other kids. But there's also this:
In a normal year, up to half of Christine Jarboe’s first-graders start school knowing how to tie their shoelaces.
But thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, school hasn’t been normal for more than two years....“You’d say, ‘Okay, can you show me how to tie your shoes?’ and most of them would just kind of look at me, like, really confused,” Jarboe said. “They really weren’t sure even where to start.”
....In Fairfax County, Jarboe has kicked off a weekly shoelace tying contest. She provides laces to students who wear Velcro or slip-on footwear, and hands out small hourglass sand timers so children can time themselves. Since Jarboe began the competition two months ago, improvement has been rapid: As of early April, 17 of her 20 students have learned to fashion and dismember double knots with aplomb.
Two things here. First, do schools really teach kids how to tie their shoelaces these days? When did that start? I certainly don't recall that from first grade. I mean, how do these kids get to school in the first place?
Second, why would kids no longer know how to tie their shoelaces after spending a couple of years at home? Did their parents not teach them just because there was a pandemic going on? Did they just not wear shoes because they weren't going anywhere? Or what? This is very strange.
The answer is Velcro. Very few little kids shoes come with laces any more, so there's no reason for the kids to learn how to tie laces. It's becoming an obsolete skill, like writing cursive.
Velcro shoes have been around at least since the 80s. Do you really think they are more common now? If they are, though, I say great! I mean there is something absurd that in the 21st century we are still attaching shoes to our feet by tying bits of string.
Yes, they're more common now.
Back in the 80s as a kid who was never good at tying shoes, I had to hunt for velcro.
OK, but is Velcro more common now in 2022 vs 2019? Cause the anecdotes are all about how kids today can't tie their shoes but apparently more of them could pre-pandemic. Velcro didn't just happen over the last 3 years.
Plenty of adult velcro too. Not really very important.
Velcro does sound like the reason. Back in kindergarten we had a special wooden appliance to learn on. It was a board with a shoe design painted on it, complete with holes for laces. (And the laces too . . .) This was in the mid-50s, though, when student were expected to move along faster.
...or you were expected to learn a more limited number of skills. How many appliances and apps do you think kids have memorized by the time they're in school?
As I posted above my grandkids are learning to read and do more complex math at younger ages than my generation did. What this teacher is seeing is likely just a fluke since kids are taught to tie shoes by their parents and were around their parents more than usual during the pandemic. Of the teacher may just have the “kids today are worse than we were” bias that has been around for many, many generations. My mom used to talk about how adults thought that about her generation who were teens in the 1920s.
Is Velcro more common now (2022) than it was pre-pandemic (2019)? If it isn't, then it can't explain why kids in 2022 can't tie their shoes but kids as recently as 2019 could.
I disagree that students were expected to move along faster in the fifties. The math my grandkids’ are expected to do in first grade is much more advanced that what we did and kids are expected to be reading by the end of kindergarten. (These are public schools which follow the state curriculum here in the southeast.) The two in 4th and 6th are doing much more advanced math, including beginning algebra. The 6th grader is now in an advanced class and will start learning calculus next year.
When I was in school in Ohio we learned to read with the Dick and Jane sight word method which only started in first grade since kindergarten was not mandatory. Most kids didn’t start reading well until 2nd grade.
I remember my grandfather teaching me how to tie my shoes. Fortunately, it was he, and not my grandmother, who no doubt would have taught me to tie a granny knot. I don't remember anyone being taught how to tie their shoes in school. Maybe I just lived in a more enlightened community that didn't need it.
My mother taught me, and I still remember distinctly when I did it by myself because she wasn't around: very loose, but by myself! Woo-hoo! I was about 21 when one morning I realized that all this time I had been tying granny knots and this was why my laces always came undone. It was an effort to retrain my habits.
I learned to tie shoes by myself. Never needed anybody to show it.
Very unlikely.
after a year of being inside, I imagine
1. a lot of kids didn't wear shoes as much.
2. parents are definitely more likely to "just tie them" so they can get a move on.
Definitely a proxy for socialization and independence skills.
Can't Really Tie?????
So this is the CRT they banned in VA schools?
Winner!
Nice one!
only allowed to wear velcro shoes in VA.
Nice ^-^
I've got a 2nd grader and a 4th grader at home and I'm 43 years old. I can say for sure that even my 4th grader has lots of sneaker choices that don't require laces. A lot of shoes for kids have well placed elastics and velcro, well beyond the options I had as a kid. For me, by the time I hit first or second grade, most everything was lace-up.
Bottom line, the shoe styles just aren't requiring kids to learn to tie shoes as early as they used to. I'm not sure when that transition happened, but I'm skeptical it's just a matter of the pandemic.
I am ambidextrous. I could certainly tie my own shoes well before kindergarten. However, it was not until I was 20 that my future husband’s grandfather pointed out to me that I was tying them backwards. Instead of lying gracefully to either side of each shoe, the bows lay vertically, toe to ankle. All those years!
I thought it was just me! I'm left-handed and my ties are always vertical.
It's tough. I can do my own correctly when looking at them top down with toes pointing away from me but fail pretty much every time when trying to tie laces when they are oriented the other way such as when tying someone else's.
Honestly I think parents just forgot stuff. My kid had to remind me that she needed to finish driving lessons and get her license, go on birth control, get a prom dress, apply to college, and get her hair cut. I'm guessing most four year olds are not nagging their parents about teaching them to tie shoes.
Mrs. Lynn, my kindergarten teacher, ridiculed students in front of the class at the start of the school year for not knowing how to tie their shoes and refused to tie them.
Same with Mrs. Nichols. She was very mean. They didn't really diagnose anxiety in five year olds in 1971, but I probably had it. Every day, kids got yelled at and ridiculed for all kinds of things. You never knew when it would be your turn.
Windsor knots will be next...
I don't remember, so I had to ask my mother. I apparently insisted on learning how to tie my own before I was coordinated enough to do it, and was extremely frustrated with that. But I was apparently tying my own shoes well before school age.
I only interact with one kid regularly and he's not mine, so I disqualify myself from any discussion of how Kids These Days relate to their foot clothes.
"I had to ask my mother"
LOL. Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes. I have a sort of complicated last name. On the phone when I say my name and the other person asks "How do you spell that?" I say "Usually my mother helps me."
Thanks to Soupy Sales.
Don't forget, this isn't a case of "forgetting" how to tie their shoes. These are 6 year olds who rarely went outside the house for the ages of 4 & 5. They didn't put on real shoes often enough to learn the knot, to say nothing of the influence of Velcro which is real.
Yeah, skills need repetition to sink in... not enough to tire off, but jsut enough to remember.
Kids who don't do it every day won't memorize it at the same rates.
I distinctly remember shoe-tying being part of what we were taught in pre-school back in the early 70s.
I have a seven-year-old daughter, nearing the end of second grade. She has never owned shoes with laces and would have no idea what to do with laces. Moreover, it's never really even entered my mind as an issue until now. I honestly suspect years more might go by before she learns, unless she decides to take up a sport.
It's not just velcro. Plenty of shoes these days don't require laces or velcro, they just slip on.
And the issue isn't just that this is easier for kids. It's easier for parents. Why would I buy shoes with laces for my three-year-old, when that just means an extra chore when leaving the house?
I suspect the pandemic link is mostly a red herring, but maybe there's something to it.
Can she tie any sort of knot?
She can take fake kid knots where she wraps rope around and around something and basically creates a giant tangle. But basically no. I'm sure when she wants to she will learn how to tie some knots. The need doesn't come up as often as you might think (although I'm sure it depends on what the kid is into).
I swear the majority of little kids I see these days are wearing crocs.
Is that what they're wearing when they're on your lawn?
First, do schools really teach kids how to tie their shoelaces these days? When did that start? I certainly don't recall that from first grade. I mean, how do these kids get to school in the first place?
Well, back just after dinosaurs ceased to walk the earth, I'm told I failed shoe-tying in Kindergarten. I believe my two daughters were taught shoe-tying in Montessori pre-school if not Kindergarten.
Of course, today, perhaps that bit of education has been replaced by ... Critical Lace Theory? ... 🙂
Ha!
I didn't learn to tie my shoes until 2nd grade, but I have always been (to the present) really bad at anything involving manual dexterity. It runs in the family; a couple of years ago my sister (Oxford MA) and I were helping my brother-in-law, a special ed teacher, cut and glue some project for his class. After watching us, he exasperatedly remarked that his developmentally-challenged 7-year-olds could do it better.
As a parent, I can say that this is my experience in these matters:
A) kids do not normally learn to tie shoes at school, but going to in-person school is often the thing that pushes parents to teach the skill. Many parents who normally would have made sure to teach it in the summer before pre-K or Kindergarten simply had no deadline for doing it, and so it didn't happen on the normal schedule. Once forgotten, it remained forgotten for many. There were other things to worry about, like having enough masks that fit.
B) many kids just didn't wear shoes during the pandemic. My kids wore only winter boots during the winter (they had nowhere to go but the homes of relatives) and sandals all summer. When schools announced some in-person education in spring 2021 we had to race to buy actual shoes, because we didn't own any that fit.
My kids were old enough that they knew how to tie shoes pre-pandemic. But I can easily see how parents missed the boat. We had last minute scrambles trying to buy shoes, extra mittens (kids who only play in the yard don't lose mittens), and bigger backpacks. The normal schedule of kid prep was totally messed up.
This answer sounds the closest to the truth. People slack off if they don't have to do something, and parents didn't need to teach kids to tie their own shoes to go off to school for 1-2 years so some of them didn't do it, combined with kids going for longer periods without leaving home at all so they took longer to get the habit of tying shoes to stick.
I was very slow to tie my shoes, as my younger brother and sister will to this day tell you (although my failure to learn gets more dramatic each year. Reality was 6, but I think they are saying I didn't learn til high school).
Definitely the pandemic, I think. Teachers usually do a check because it's a manual dexterity check, and then the kids who don't know how see that other kids do and learn from them, or are quickly taught by the teacher. Combination of age appropriate development and peer influence.
Retarded parents teaching retarded kids. Overbreeding has consequences
Can we delete the bigotry, please?
And, do you feel better now?
Back when people lived in caves, before they got overbred, they had no trouble tying their laces.
Never feed the troll. It exists to feed off your hatred of it.
It's because kids never play outdoors by themselves any more. When I was little all shoes required tying and also we couldn't go play outdoors without putting them on so there was a big incentive to learn how to do it. We were roaming all around the neighborhood long before we went to school. I walked by myself to school from kindergarten on up so had to be able to tie my shoes just to get to school.
I wish schools would stop wasting time on crap like this. As a parent, only send your kid to elementary school in clothes they can self manage so our overburdened teachers don’t have to zip coats, buckle belts, or yes, tie their shoes for them.
Wow. It's almost as if we learn lots by attending school in person - even if by accident!
In kindergarten, we could earn a nice big fat pencil (without eraser) by tying our shoes. I didn't know how at that point. I wore boots that day to avoid the subject (pre-velcro days). I don't remember if I got a pencil or not. Fine motor skills come to people at different times, but I don't have any problem with the concept being part of school activities as long as it's understood not all kids fit in that cookie cutter.
We used to dream of having shoes ...