When to start wearing shoes? And are second handy baby shoes OK?

[abigboydidit]

So, the title says it all really! My DS is 8 months old. He has been crawling for almost 2 months and now walks around holding onto furniture. My inlaws have been pressurising me since he was about 12 weeks old to put shoes on him and when he started crawling they wanted to march me down to Clarks for crawling shoes (are there such a thing?) & are now getting agitated that he must get cruising shoes. I have no clue about this but he seems too young to have proper shoes..yet at the same time I don't want to do harm by not putting them on. Can you tell this is my first child?!

Also - my friends have offered me some 2nd hand pairs of their children's cruisers/early walkers. They look almost new and they reassure me that they grew out of them so fast, they were hardly warn. But (here I go again..) I've never been keen on the idea of 2nd hand shoes (though anything else going spare, am more than happy to snaffle!).

So - 2 questions! When did/should you start putting shoes on a baby and would you use 2nd hand pairs? Thank you!

If you do go for the soft leather shoes, I really recommend snuggle feet. They're half the price of the other brands but lovely quality and they were very friendly and helpful when I phoned up with a question about sizing.

bertie dd wears those,or rather i put them on her and she takes them off she is always in bare freezing feet. she has even started to take mine off,strange child.

Checked the sizing as DS has fairly big feet and think snuggle feet would only last a month or so (but next size up too big) so managed to get a pair of roobeze in the sale!

DS is 18mo and walking a lot, but he still just wears soft sheepskin boots. Everyone at toddler group thinks I am a bit mad, they are always commenting on him being in his slippers

If we are going outside, he's got some Stonz that go over his normal booties. We tried wellies but he just fell over constantly as he couldn't flex his foot or ankle in them at all.

like many others I waited until both DC were walking independently for a few weeks and then went out and got their feet measured and bought a pair of shoes. I personally do not see the point of babies having shoes on until they can walk outdoors. It's expensive once you start, so no point doing it until you really really have to IMO.