I was going to post this as a Wordless Wednesday.
But… I couldn’t post this picture of my 5 year old daughter’s feet without some explanation.
What would the Internets think of me as a mother?
My daughter’s feet look like this 9 months out of the year.
She Who Does Not Wear Shoes. And Who Runs Outside Barefoot.
Wanna hear the funny part?
We had just been cleaning the kitchen.
And the floor was freshly mopped like, ten minutes before I snapped this pic.
And look what she’s doing.
See the irony?
I’m a shoeless kind of gal myself. And my sons hate wearing shoes. I love that she is cleaning the table! lol
Yes, she does like to clean, so that’s why it’s so funny that her feet always look like that.
Don’t feel bad
my girls (10 and 12) run barefoot ALL summer long and any time they are not in school, we live in a tropical area. It actually is good for her to go barefoot as much as possible, it helps to develop her feet correctly as well as allows them to develop tough enough to deal with small amounts of broken glass, sharp rocks, etc when she is older. The only time my daughters are not barefoot (when out of school) is when they have their heelys on. I usually keep a couple of pairs of flipflops in the car for when the parking lot is too hot for them. Also my girls’ feet are also dirty most of the time like yours. One suggestion — if she decides to wash them off, the outside garden hose is better than the bathtub or sink (unless you want her to convert the bathroom into a birdbath [ha ha ha ha]).
Seriously, encourage her to go barefoot and accept the dirty feet, it’s good for her, helps them grow correctly and toughen for when she is older. It will also help her if you enroll her in dance or gymnastics when she is older. Dawn
Yes, it is funny she is cleaning and her feet are so dirty. Like the other person (dawn) said, I wouldn’t worry about it. My 7yo goes barefoot all the time too, except in school. Her normal ‘clothing’ during the summer vacation months consists of one of her several swim suits and barefeet. If I am going to the shop, the pulls a t-shirt over her head and goes barefoot. When I was painting her toenails the other night after her bath, I was surprised how tough the bottoms of her feet have become. Very tough feet. Anyhow, i always make sure to keep her toenails painted because she often kneels down outside on the sidewalk (drawing pictures with chalk) and it helps protect them when she is playing outside. Her feet are at least as diry as those in the photo, always when I’ve been grocery shopping. My daughter is quite a monkey, always barefoot, often found climbing trees, all she is missing is a tail, But I love my little monkey, even with her usually dirty feet!
What would a childhood be without bare feet?
My daughter goes barefoot most of the time too, the first thing she does when she comes home from school is kicks off her shoes and pulls her socks off. She then goes out to play in her barefeet and they often look like your photo when she comes back.
She has a friend the same age next door who does the same, it must go with the age.
Question: Do you take her out shopping barefoot or do you make her wear shoes when you go out?
I used to let mine go barefoot and I would make her ride in the shopping cart if she was barefoot. But as she has grown older, she now climbs out and the bottoms of her feet are black by the time we reach the checkout.
It doesn’t seem to bother her, during cooler months, I will let her walk across the parking lot in her barefeet, but down in Florida, I insist in her climbing back in the shopping cart during the summer if she isn’t wearing shoes and I lift her into the car, because the pavement can get very warm down here.
It seems letting her go barefoot most of her life since she was born has helped to develop very tough soles and she goes almost everywhere barefoot without even thinking about it.
Once I was not paying attention and didn’t notice until after she had walked over some bits of broken glass in a parking lot. I laid her down on a bench so I could check the bottoms of her feet and aside from dirt, she had no cuts or glass stuck in her. She said “mommy, I didn’t feel a thing”.
I guess she was right, her feet were fine. I usually keep a pair of flipflops in the car, but she almost never will wear them.
I think it has helped to make her feet tougher by letting her go barefoot as much as I have. Some people think it is neglect, well I am not so sure. She HAS shoes, she simply does not wear them by her own choice and her best friend is the same way.
Rachael
Hey, just found your site! Don’t feel too bad about her feet getting dirty, her’s looks about the same as mine did when we were visiting Universal (in Orlando) last week. I took my 10yo daughter and her best friend to the theme park. Of course, they stripped down to their bare feet and bathing suits they wore under their clothes when they went to the water rides (I stayed dry!)
Funny thing! After the water rides and they had dried, they were dressed back in their clothes, I noticed they were both carrying their shoes instead of wearing them. I asked the girls about their shoes and my daughter lifted her feet to show me how dirty the bottoms of her feet were and her friend said “we don’t want to get the insides of our shoes dirty”. LOL, I could not argue with them, they actually made sense! A couple of the park employees did tell them they should be wearing shoes, but no one stopped them from going on the rides the rest of the day.
I think next time I will include a couple of pairs of flip flops in the back pack
Her best friend had joined us for a weekend trip to Orlando, so her friend’s mom will never know I was a bad parent and let her daughter run around barefoot at Universal all day
or the hotel the following day 
Ironically, the girls must have preferred being barefoot, because when we were back at the hotel, they went to breakfast and the arcade the next morning also in their bare feet. I THINK her friend was wearing shoes when we took her home LOL.
Sharon
Interesting comments Sharon, your daughter and mine have something in common. I have taken my daughter and her best friend to the parks at Universal before and had the same type of situation. Usually Becca (her bf) always wore shoes or sandals whenever she came over, the day we went to universal, she wore colorful socks with slip on shoes (slides). After we had been on Spiderman, the strap on one of Becca’s slides broke where it attached to the shoe (not fixable), I guess they were not made well. I suggested we could find a store to buy her some shoes, but Becca said she’d take off the other slide and she could go in her socks. Well as a mother, I did not feel it was a good idea for Becca to walk around Universal all day in her socks, it would be impossible to get them clean as they could not be bleached and there were plenty of wet places up ahead of us, so I told her to take her socks off, until we could find a place that sells shoes she can go barefoot. Reluctantly she pulled them off and handed them to me to put in my backpack. Well when we arrived at the popeye ride, my daughter already had her shoes off and was stuffing them in the backpack and both went on the ride barefoot by themselves (I was left to keep the ‘dry’ things). The ride attendant did say something about their feet but let them on anyhow. After that, we went to ripsaw falls and then river adventure, the three wettest rides they have. After popeye I offered to buy Becca some crocs, but she said she would prefer to just go barefoot. So the girls spent the rest of the day walking around Universal in their barefeet. By the time we arrived at the car that night, the bottoms of both were black and dirty. As Becca was spending the night, that was nothing the bath could not fix. It seems normal at Universal later in the day for kids to be barefoot, we saw lots more as it got later. Hannah