Parents of young children: How many pairs of shoes per year?

[Mike 03]

This morning Nike unveiled a shoe subscription program for parents of growing kids:

Nike announced Monday that it is debuting Nike Adventure Club, a sneaker subscription for kids ages two through 10. Nike will offer parents three options for their kids: four pairs of sneakers a year for $20 a month, six pairs for $30 a month or 12 pairs for $50 a month. Parents and kids will be able to choose from a selection of around 100 sneakers.

This article caught my attention because I thought: This would be brilliant for the environment if parents could return the shoes as their kids outgrew them, to be reused or recycled.. But then I started wondering about the number of shoes a child goes through. Not being a parent, I don't know...

Is that your experience, that a child can go through 6, 12 pair of shoes in a year? Is that your experience? That's amazing to me and I'd never really given it a single moment's thought until today.

What do you do with the shoes after the child's outgrown them? Save them for sentimental reasons? Toss them? Donate them? If you add up all the baby/child shoes in a society, that's a huge number of shoes!

Curious minds want to know.

[frazzled]

1. Some people have more than one kid

I think that's your answer. If you have two kids, you will probably go through 4 pairs of sneakers per year (2 per kid: young kids' feet grow at a pretty fast pace, and sizing up can get pretty frequent). Just saying.

[Mike 03]

3. Oh duh!

Thank you. It's early.

[Ohiogal]

2. I have 3 sons, they are 6 years apart

All adults now.... we lived on my husband's salary, he was a public school teacher.

Every fall they got a new pair of athletic shoes for school and they also had a nice pair of shoes for, say, dressing up. The nice dressup shoes didn't get worn much so I often bought those at consignment stores or they were hand-me-downs from the older brother. But the athletic shoes generally lasted for the whole school year. After that, they were usually pretty hammered, I couldn't give them away, I just tossed them. If they were wearable but had holes or rips, I had the kids wear them for outdoor shoes in the summer. Never had help in paying for anything from grandparents.

When they were really young, like toddlers, we had a lot of hand-me-downs since they were all boys. They wore the shoes out most of the time, so keeping them as keepsakes or donating them to charity was out of the question, but whoever said a kid goes through 12 pairs of shoes a year, that is ludicrous. Even at the most I bought them 2 pairs a year and that wasn't very often.

[Mike 03]

4. Thank you.

I guess Nike was thinking about families with multiple kids. I should have thought about that.

My mother used to take me to get new sneakers at the beginning of each school year, like you're talking about. But I don't remember when I was very, very young, and I don't know how fast feet grow in those first years.

"12 pairs of shoes a year, that is ludicrous." - LOL

[Ohiogal]

5. Even if a kid needs 2 pairs per year

Which to me sounds reasonable.... you’d have to have 6 kids to need 12 pairs of shoes a year! Not many big families like that these days!

[handmade34]

6. just wait until the kids

are teenagers, and all runners...

no words to describe the number of shoes we went through... it helped a lot when one son got the job of "trying out" and reviewing Nike shoes

[MissB]

8. Yeah. And not just one running sport

Both my boys did cross country and track. They ran year round to stay in form. It got expensive.

[yellowdogintexas]

7. depends on if they are in a growth spurt

my daughter wore the same size for over a year then she started jumping sizes every 3 months. My happiest day was when she finally got past that awkward spot between children's shoe sizes and woman's! Shoes are harder to find in that inbetween stage