Tips for Fitting Shoes

We have put together the following tips to help parents shop for shoes for their child. As practitioners, we thought you might find these useful to share with your patient families. We are now including this information, along with the information describing the advantages to specially designed footwear, with every DAFO brace we ship.

Guidelines and Tips for Fitting Shoes Over Braces

1. You may find it is easier to shop for shoes without your child. Take the brace with you, and try fitting the brace into the shoe alone. It is usually possible to purchase the shoes, take them home for a relaxed fitting session, and return the shoes if they don’t work.

2. Try to find the smallest shoe that can accommodate the brace. This usually means that you will have to wiggle and push the brace into the shoe before the heel will drop into the shoe.

This extra bit of work usually means the shoe will be only slightly larger (longer) than normal. Too much length will impinge on optimal gait by increasing dragging and tripping over the toes.

3. Most shoes have a padded insole that is glued or placed in the bottom that can be removed after purchase to provide a slight increase in volume. Some of the specialty shoes provide more than one insole to assist in customizing the shoe volume.

4. If your child only wears one brace, your child might require two different sized shoes – one size for the uninvolved foot and a larger size for the braced foot. Nordstrom® and some selected special needs brands (noted in separate article) will sell split pairs of shoes for this very reason. It’s also possible to put a molded insole into the unbraced foot’s shoe to help balance out the volume. Cascade Dafo’s HotDog and PattiBob shoe inserts are ideally suited for this application and can be included in your DAFO order.