If PARENTS designed shoes
It is clear that shoe-designers do not ask parents of 13 year-old boys when designing shoes. Of course, they sell so many more shoes because they don’t.
IF parents were involved in the design:
Heels…NOT toes…would be reinforced. See, reinforced toes accentuate kicking-damage (to the target). Obviously we don’t want that (and likely have no JR. size shoes so equipped in our home - but read on).
Merely NOT having steel-toes is not enough. I want my son to choose to UNTIE his shoes before removing.
NOT GONNA HAPPEN!
But the fight I have YET to abandon is that he at least UNTIE his shoes before JAMMING HIS FEET INTO THEM!
Within a week of purchasing any pair of shoes: there is NO heel remaining. There is a second ‘tongue’ - but this fails to serve any purpose. I don’t need a second tongue. YOU don’t need a second tongue (unless English is not your native language). My SON doesn’t need a second tongue. What he needs…what I PAID for…is a heel. A part of the shoe which:
A) holds the shoe ON (try running through an airport with MY gang and see how many times one has to drop out of the race to replace a shoe [Lorrie not excluded]).
B) maintains some meaningful (and presentable) shape! Orchestra concerts, funerals, weddings, etc. have lost some of their dignity for me when I escort my child in what appear to be SLIPPERS.
Now I realize, if I had a shoe that actually held its form, I’d probably have to purchase new ones every time my child out-grew them instead of watching the shapeless blob of leather merely stretch to accomodate. That would be a reasonable exchange for the number of times I’ve had to replace shoes that were STILL a size too large because the kid yanked the entire thing into two pathetic scraps trying to pull up the hated heel-caught-under-foot dilemma so common to people who do not pay for their own footwear.
And DON’T even get me started on SOCKS! We have so few that are complete (I’m not talking about a missing mate, I’m talking about not a single complete sock: toes, ball of the foot, heel, and elastic ‘top’) doing laundry is like sorting out the trash lately.