Why do school shoes (or any shoes) have a heel🤔
Many schools here is Australia have a uniform policy stating that the shoe should have a heel. I was incensed reading this as my daughter was starting high school last year.
Breathe easy Andy… they mean a ‘closed in heel’ rather than an elevated heel.
I wrote this for a few concerned parents of natural shoe wearing kids to have ready if schools complained.
“Starting from the feet, when standing on a positive heel the forefoot is incorrectly over loaded, the ankle is in a plantarflexed position, the knee is loaded in a quadriceps dominant position, the pelvis is tilted anteriorly and the lumbar spine has increased curve. The negative changes continue to occur further up the spine, shoulder girdle and neck.
These things occur when wearing any sized heel.
Heels originally became prevalent hundreds of years ago. A ‘vertically challenged’ member of the Royal family decreed that a high heel only be worn by the highest in society with different heel heights gradually decreasing depending upon your social standing. Peasants were in flat shoes.
Not dissimilar to eastern cultures using foot binding techniques, those in a heel that didn’t allow normal function and definitely making manual labour impossible were obviously above such menial work.
I do hope we’ve progressed beyond these ancient body damaging status symbols used in clothing”
Homework… next time you see a kid walking to school in a heeled shoe (99%), watch how after the heel hits the ground, the forefoot slaps down hard onto the ground. The leverage of the heel pretty much slams the forefoot onto the ground in a very stiff unnatural way.
Add 5 days a week for 12 years on a developing body and meet foot dysfunction.
