How To Measure Kids Feet For Shoes

It's easy to give your child the perfect fit with Josh's tips and tricks for measuring your kid's feet for shoes at home.

Check out the full review with transcript below.

Josh: What we'll do here is get a pen, texta, pencil or whatever you'd like to use at home. From own personal experience, using a permanent texta is a nightmare when you have to wash it off their feet so maybe grab a pen or pencil.

Let's trace Louie's feet. We're coming around doing his left foot first. We aren’t doing a Picasso so it doesn’t have to look amazing. As long as you've got the most furthest point of their forefoot and the most furthest base of their heel, essentially that is what we will be looking for and what we'll be measuring.

I'll get Louie to step off the piece of paper and we'll see what we've got.

What we've got here is Louie's left and right foot after my tracing efforts. I've already jumped ahead and done the next phase.

You need to put a dot at the most furthest point of his heel on the right and left foot. Louie happens to have his big toe being his longest toe. Don’t be alarmed if your child at home as a second or third toe a bit longer, that’s OK. I've done the dots at the top of his first toe, being the longest.

Get your ruler and literally measure from the back dot all the way up to the most furthest point of the foot. As you see here we have a measurement of 19cm.

The left foot is on a slight angle but that's OK, it's just how Louie was standing at the time with it slightly turned in, but the measurement will still be the same. We've got 0cm at the base of the heel and as you come up to his toe, it's a little under 19cm.

From a fitting perspective obviously kids grow, and you'll want to look at potentially jumping up to a shoe that will give us a 19.5cm to 20cm measurement. There you have it, that’s the tracing of the foot and how to measure how long your child's foot is.

Next phase of the fitting process is to try some shoes on. Going on Louie's measurement with the piece of paper we had a 19cm length foot both left and right. Therefore with the luxury we have in the shop we've got a 19.5cm and a 20cm shoe here to try on.

What's the golden rule when trying shoes on? You have to wear...

Louie: Socks because otherwise you'll get blisters and no one likes blisters. 

Josh: That was completely unplanned but thank you. Always wear socks before you put your shoes on. We'll try the slightly smaller one first.

19.5cm in Asics happens to be a 13US kids'. Centimetres in US sizes can change quite a bit between brands.

Louie happens to be in the preschool bracket so there's a number of shoes that come in laces setup and Velcro, but Velcro finishes in size 3 so we still fall into that preschool category.

With your kids at home there's a little trick to trying on shoes and seeing their measurements. Get them standing up nice and tall. When they put their foot in they usually slide forward a little bit from the back of the heel.

Louie if you can do be a little favour and go 'tap tap' with your heel. What that does is it just pulls the heel in the back of the shoe where it should be and from there we can have a look at where the toe space is by getting them to wiggle their toes.

In terms of where Louie's toe is, it's just behind the stitching seen here. If Louie was an adult and he wasn’t going to grow anymore I'd say that's a good fit because it's nice and secure.

Louie, how much are you going to grow this year?

Louie: As tall as uncle Jack.

Josh: As tall as your uncle Jack, wow!

OK, therefore we need a bit more space. What we're going to do is take that shoe off, that being the 19.5cm and then we're going to try the 20cm one on and see how we go.