Learning how to tie shoelaces can be challenging but it is an important self-care skill for your child to learn! It is an important skill to master for many reasons including, teaching your child important skills like following directions, sorting, sequencing, planning, hand-eye coordination and midline crossing. Developing this skill will also help your child to develop their dexterity and independence.
Here are some tips to help when teaching your child how to tie shoelaces.
- Start with your child sitting at a table, practising with a shoe on the table in front of them. Once your child is able to independently complete all stages of tying a shoelace on a shoe on a table in front of them, they can then move on to practising with the shoe on their foot.
- Teach your child how to untie their laces first. This is easier.
- Physically help your child, placing your hands over theirs and gradually reduce the physical support as they begin to gain confidence.
- Use backward chaining. Start by breaking the task down into small steps. You teach your child the last step first, working backward from the goal. The adult completes all the steps except the last one. Get your child to practise the final step. Your child will enjoy the success that comes from completing a task. Once your child can do the last step you complete all the steps except for the last two. You teach your child the second from last step and they then complete the last step themselves. Keep going until you are teaching the first step and your child is completing all the other steps.
- Provide lots of praise and encouragement.
- If your child is struggling, you may be attempted to take over, but please don’t. Provide lots of encouragement and give them the time they need to practise!
- Often, children find it useful to practise using two different coloured laces to help identify the laces clearly.
There are many step-by-step videos you can watch with your child. You can pause these at any time so your child can do the step immediately after watching it. There are also step-by-step visual guides that are really useful to use. Below is a video, plus a link to a resource that we think is really helpful.
