Overcome resistance with fancy purple shoes

January 28, 2010

My almost-2-year-old daughter is obsessed with shoes. She will just sit in our shoe corner and try on everyone’s shoes and walk around in them for fun. Her favorite ones, though, are her own pink shiny ones.

The trouble started when inevitably, her favorite pink shoes became too small – or rather her feet grew too large. I took her to the store to pick out some new ones. She chose the purple ones with flowers on them.

Given her love of shoes, I was surprised when she refused to wear them. Even though she had picked them out, she would run away whenever we even picked them up. If we were able to put them on, she would immediately pull them off her feet and toss them as far as she could. She would then scurry around to find her shiny pink shoes that by now were scrunching her toes.

This morning we hid the pink shoes. I fully expected the morning to end with tears and a barefoot daughter on the way to school.

Then her Daddy had a stroke of genius. “Let’s put on your FANCY shoes!” he said.

Every night at bedtime my daughter insists that we read Fancy Nancy, a story about a girl who enhances everything she wears and owns with accessories. It’s a fairly long book for someone who’s not quite two, but she follows along with the story intently.

Catching on to his idea, I pointed out how the flowers made her new shoes fancy, like Nancy’s.

With a little bit of a struggle (but not the usual all-out wrestling match), she let him put them on. And then they stayed on her feet.

Tonight, before leaving for dinner, she fussed a bit when he tried to put her shoes on again. This time, it was because she wanted to put them on by herself.