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Babies walk best in stiff leather shoes.
Not true, say researchers at Connecticut Children's Medical Center who spent months studying the way babies learn to walk. The findings toppled the long-held conventional wisdom that the first steps are flatfooted stomps that make a baby's gait look similar to that of Frankenstein. With that assumption, the stiff, high-topped baby shoe was born, designed by shoe companies to support flatfooted steps and wobbly ankles. But just as babies are nothing like Frankenstein, neither are they like foals or calves, which balance at first on unstable pins, the researchers found out. Babies' ankles, it turns out, are perfectly stable from the beginning, making the traditional high-topped shoe unnecessary.