Do kids still get picked on for their shoes?

Beyond the making a living part, I am not in charge of procuring clothing for the boys. In fact, I may have less to do with this particular aspect of parenthood than any other. Lea does a marvelous job.

I do wonder whether some fashion pressures have relaxed since I was in the seventh grade. I remember a good deal of stress surrounding shoes. Your daily wear needed to be athletic shoes of an acceptable brand. Nike, Reebok, and Adidas were all reliably safe, followed by a close second tier of Converse, Puma, Asahi, and probably one or two I’m forgetting.

South of there, it was mean streets. The worst were the ones that looked sort of like the acceptable names, but weren’t. Trax? Cuga? Remember those? They reliably drew derision. (There was also always the poor kid whose mother sent him to school in casual brown or black shoes that should have been reserved for church.)

Our boys’ daily wear may or may not be on the “acceptable” brand list of my childhood. They’ve also not necessarily been athletic shoes. “Outdoors” and even walking shoes have made appearances. And Lea spends, dollar for dollar, about what my mother did for mine more than 30 years ago, which of course means they’re considerably less expensive today. Yet I never hear a peep that indicates they’re getting picked on, or a report of such from their mother.

So are kids nicer today than they were in my childhood? Or was I in elementary or middle school with unusually mean kids? Or are kids every bit as mean as they were back then, only about different things today? Or something else?

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