This Kid’s Shoe-Tying Hack is Absolutely Brilliant

Teaching a kid to tie their shoes can be a huge struggle and if we’re being honest, a lot of the mnemonic devices that we have for shoelace tying are surprisingly difficult to keep in your head. But one five-year-old named Colton may have adorably cracked the code on teaching your kid how to lace up and he shows off his brilliant shoe-tying hack in a video that has now gone viral.

While tying shoes might seem like second nature to most of us, the reason adults have an easy time tying our shoelaces is that our fingers are big enough to hold the two loops shut while we tie the shoes up. This is where a lot of kids get stuck because tying a knot but maintaining the integrity of the loop is harder for people with little kid hands. Colton’s method brilliantly removes this challenge from the equation.

“My name is Colton and there’s a new way to tie shoes,” he says in the video, before also explaining that he has a loose tooth to deal with as well.

Instead of holding the loops shut with his fingers, Colton tucks the plastic topped end of the shoelace into the hole that the lace came out of. Effectively, this makes the loops easier to handle and gives the kid more space to tie the knot with ease. After tying the knot, Colton simply popped the two ends out of the shoelace hole and went about his day.

Colton’s lesson was originally posted as a video to the Facebook page Love What Matters and has been viewed over seven million times. But it turns out Colton didn’t actually come up with this technique himself, as he admits at the end of the video that he learned the trick from a friend. This means that other kids can pick up the trick without too much of a challenge, which could mean the ‘bunny ear’ method becomes a forgotten relic of the past.