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Parents who avoid teaching children how to tie shoelaces are 'hindering their development'
Expert warns that the art of tying shoelaces is an important one to learn and should not be avoided by using velcro shoes
It is one of the perils of going back to school, causing equal anguish for both parent and child.
But however tricky it may be to master the art of tying shoelaces, an expert has warned that parents should not take the easy way out by repeatedly buying their offspring Velcro or slip-on shoes.
Ian Fieggen, who is known as Professor Shoelace, said children were getting worse at the practice because they were being allowed to avoid it.
"There was some research that looked into the fact that children were learning these things later in life because they were able to put them off," he said.
"Parents are able to give their kids Velcro shoes so they can delay these developmental milestones.
"This is actually a problem because it's not just that they can't tie their shoe laces but they no longer have gone through a difficult thing to learn and found that OK, it does sometimes take a lot of work to learn something."
A report published in 2013 showed that few children had managed to learn the skill before the age of six, with many still having difficulty until the age of nine or ten when they started getting interested in sport.
The findings represented a major shift in social habits. Just thirty years ago, being able to tie shoelaces was regarded as a skill to be learnt by the age of four, but changes in shoe design and footwear fashions mean the skill is no longer essential until much older.
Mr Fieggen, who has written a book on the subject called Laces and has a website dedicated to the art, acknowledged that children have different learning styles and that a technique that works for one might be too hard to grasp for another.
He advised parents who were struggling to teach their children to mark a pair of shoelaces so they know which parts need to be held and which parts need to be lined up with each other.
He also suggested getting two different coloured laces to help those who struggle with left and right.
He told Radio 4's Today programme: "Parents have never really thought about the process of how you teach children to tie their shoelaces.
"It's become such an automatic thing through their lifetime, the first time they have to do it, they don't even know where to start."