Sweets is 15 months old. She has motor, communication, and cognitive delays with no diagnosis yet. She sees a physical therapist and a developmental therapist.
She is cruising but not walking, but is almost always on her toes. She has weak core muscles and poor balance. Our first physical therapist told me not to put shoes on her at all, that if I had to put shoes on her they should be soft shoes (like Robeez), and that barefoot is definitely best. She said that while hard shoes might allow my daughter to walk better while in them in the short-term, that they would actually make it harder for her to develop the right muscles properly in the long-term because they do a lot of the work for her. She said to wait until my daughter was able walk well before using hard shoes. Since she told me that (over 2 months ago), my daughter has only been barefoot (hey, it's summer!).
Now, yesterday, her developmental therapist saw her and said that she strongly recommends putting hard shoes on her to help her learn to walk with flat feet. This is completely the opposite of what the other therapist said! So now I don't know what to do with this information, but I tend to favor the physical therapist over the developmental therapist since that is her specialty.
