Review of the Scarpa Drago Kids' Rock Climbing Shoe

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The video goes in depth into the Scarpa Drago kids’ version, getting into how it edges, smears, performs on rock, performs on plastic… all the stuff. That’s important. But I also spend a good part of the beginning video talking about comfort.

Rock climbing shoes aren’t known for their comfort; sometimes even after the break-in period, rock climbing shoes are still pretty tough to tolerate. After all, they are designed to tightly constrain (and even constrict, on some occasions) a person’s foot. That’s not to say the Scarpa Drago Kids’ is any more uncomfortable than any other performance-enhancing rock shoe, just that it’s par for the course.

So, if there ever was a piece of gear that you need to have internally-driven motivation to use, it is a rock shoe. Imagine if someone made you wear performance rock shoes all day. Would you do it? I certainly wouldn’t. (My all-day multi-pitch slippers are a different beast, but my performance shoes certainly would make my feet ache in ways I’d like to avoid). If I went to my kids, then, and said, “you need to wear these shoes so that you climb better,” then really, my kids need to buy into the benefit of “climb better.” They have to want that benefit bad enough to put up with the discomfort.

And I could extrapolate that to all sorts of things. Exercise. My kids need to like the process of improving their fitness in order to put up with the discomfort that comes with pushing their bodies to adapt. School. Not everything about school is pleasant, as we all know and can remember, but the payoff of trying is school can be almost immeasurably high. Confronting our emotions. This shows up differently for kids, who are just learning to recognize and manage their emotions, and adults, who are often trying to cope with deeply rooted traumas or other shadows in their lives, but it’s still true that acceptance of the “discomfort” is a big part of the process.

I could go on and on.

I bring this up because this seems to be at the heart of so much “adult-enabled pursuits” for kids. I am constantly trying to show my kids what’s “around the next corner” of their activity so that they can develop the will to sustain the activity… if that’s what they want. In essence, I am trying to lay the choice bare: you could potentially get this benefit if you pay this cost. In the case of climbing shoes, ‘you might be able to hold that foot placement if you had different shoes. If you want to give those shoes a chance to work, then you have to break them in.’

Then, I need to let go. There were days when the cramped feet were more than a seven-year-old was willing to handle. That was okay. There were days when one or both of them would switch back to the old shoe. I would argue that was a good thing. It both let them fully enjoy their climbing without the discomfort of breaking in a shoe and also allowed them to see the performance difference between the two shoes. My point is, their is nothing sustainable about pushing a gear choice (or much of anything else, for that matter) onto my kids. They are the ones who have to want it. And when we are talking about something that clearly has short term cost and long-term benefit, like a new performance-oriented climbing shoe such as the Scarpa Drago Kids’, I can’t do anything to make that “delayed gratification” worth it other than try to expose them to the potential benefit and then let them decide for themselves.