My kid just turned 10. She hasn't learned. She can write in cursive though.

I didn't really care about this until I brought home another pair of no-tie shoes, not velcro, but the kind with the elastic strap around them that you pull on. I bought adidas, because the nike kind in a similar style didn't hold up well. Fricking adidas strap broke IN ONE DAY and the shoes are basically useless. ONE DAY!

It's going to be a shoe tying boot camp up in here.

Anonymous wrote:Taught my NT kids around the start of kindergarten. Knowing how to tie in K brings serious street cred — lots of interaction and friends made over offering to tie someone’s shoe.

Like when your kid was learning to put on their socks and shoes, budget more time to get ready for a week or two. Let them take their time and work through the frustration without swooping in to do it better and faster.

If your NT kid is age 7+ and still doing Velcro, I do judge. And so do your kid’s teachers and coaches.

Well that's just stupid. I judge you for being such a b1tch. Who the hell cares if a kid can tie shoes at age 7 or not? My kid holds her pencil wrong and just started tying shoes (slowly) at age 8, but she's a phenomenal artist and the kindest, sweetest, best girl in the whole world. I'll take her over your kid who has asshat parents any day!

All my kids learned by 1st grade. They were all motivated to learn this big kid skill. I’m really glad because I find it pretty ridiculous when on my son’s fourth grade travel soccer team kids need to go over to coach to have shoes tied.

I will admit to not even trying to teach my 6 year old. Everyone wears velcro shoes and they aren't hard to find. i assuming he will want to learn soon, and that it will come pretty easily when he is motivated to do so.

My NT son (now 17) still couldn't do it in 3rd grade and was super embarrassed at a bowling party where the host mom had to tie his shoes for him. I had tried to teach him before but he was a pain about it so I had long given up. After that he wanted a pair of shoes with shoe laces, which he promptly got. He wore them to school before he had fully mastered it but apparently one of his friends was super supportive and helped out a lot. He had it within a week or so.

I worked with my SN son, now 13, on it for years. It finally clicked during the pandemic when he started playing tennis twice a week (lace shoes) and did a bowling class (also lace shoes). He is still slow, and sometimes needs help if the shoes have big knots, but he is independent enough I think he will just continue to improve. His next shoes will probably be tie shoes, but I'm waiting for his orthotics to switch over to a slimmer style first, so they fit in the shoes more easily.

Anonymous wrote:Taught my NT kids around the start of kindergarten. Knowing how to tie in K brings serious street cred — lots of interaction and friends made over offering to tie someone’s shoe.

Like when your kid was learning to put on their socks and shoes, budget more time to get ready for a week or two. Let them take their time and work through the frustration without swooping in to do it better and faster.

If your NT kid is age 7+ and still doing Velcro, I do judge. And so do your kid’s teachers and coaches.

I'm a teacher. My DH has coached many youth sports teams. We judge the judgy parents, not the ones whose kids can't tie their shoes.

I'm really confused how, if your kid made friends with the kids whose shoes he was tying, the kid whose shoes he was tying wasn't also making friends. Seems like either knowing or not knowing led to the same outcome.

My older kid learned how to tie around his 8th birthday. Little brother learned around his 5th. You know what? Both kids will go to college knowing how to tie shoes. I guarantee their coaches and professors won't be able to tell the difference.

I think around 6/7 - some time in first grade!

My soon to be 11 yo boy still can’t do it well. It is infuriating. I am an artist and DH is a surgeon and we cannot comprehend how our offspring cannot grasp this. I try to be patient bc he never learns or learns so slowly but it drives me crazy. He is strong in other areas, fine motor tasks are his weakness.

Have a 10 year old and an 8 year old who haven’t even tried. No need anymore.

To be fair, the 10yo was in OT for a few years for sensory stuff and even Velcro shoes and socks were often a motor struggle on their own that we stopped worrying about tying skills. Then we just didn’t even bother with the 8yo.

My 9 year still can’t do it.

I taught my DS in kindergarten. I'm a kindergarten teacher and think most kids are ready for it then. After winter break, my fine motor skills center has a shoe tying option. I used to have an assistant show the kids in that center but now that I don't have one, I use an iPad to play this video after I show them on the first day of the center.

https://youtu.be/QJVR8hHBQyM


Each student gets a pair of colored laces. If they try each time they are at the center, they get a piece of colored tape around their lace. I'd say 90% of them are able to do it independently by March/April. All students who try get to put the laces on their shoes.

My son, who is my youngest, learned this year in 2nd grade. His teacher is all about making sure the kids have mastered such “life skills”, she also made sure they memorized their parents’ phone numbers, knew their home address, how to get home from school on their own in an emergency, how to look things up in a dictionary, etc.
his older sisters probably learned at 5 or 6, but with the pandemic I just bought him Velcro shoes and didn’t think much of it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Taught my NT kids around the start of kindergarten. Knowing how to tie in K brings serious street cred — lots of interaction and friends made over offering to tie someone’s shoe.

Like when your kid was learning to put on their socks and shoes, budget more time to get ready for a week or two. Let them take their time and work through the frustration without swooping in to do it better and faster.

If your NT kid is age 7+ and still doing Velcro, I do judge. And so do your kid’s teachers and coaches.

So much of this. The reason most kids haven’t mastered this skill earlier is because of parents combined with shoe companies making so many velcro and no tie options. It’s not as though evolution stripped this generation of kids of the ability to conquer this skill between 4-7 for most.

Ok. There are a million things that we all a society can't do as well as our predecessors because technology/new tools/obsolete fashion have made the original skill less important. Not totally irrelevant to modern living, but not a skill that kids need to master by a certain age in order to participate in regular society. I don't really get what the problem is.

8 it's fine.