In article , Karen G wrote:
Are preschoolers intrinsically hard on pant's knees or is mine unique?
3 out of 7 days in the past week, my 4.5 year old has put holes in the
knees of her pants. Now in the defense of the pants, most of them are
two years old (this is the second year of her wearing these pants).

Preschoolers vary enormously on how hard they are on clothes.

In defense of the kids, more damage is done to cloth in washing
machines than by the kids---they just add the final stress that tears
clothes worn out by washing. "Stone-washed" clothes are particularly
fragile, as cellulases have been added in the manufacturing process to
digest the cotton fibers and make them behave like worn-out cloth.
Bleach is also very hard on cellulose fibers (cotton and linen).

I don't think my now 7-year-old son has ever torn the knees of any of
his pants. I attribute this to three things:
1) He's not very active, prefering reading to most forms of
physical activity. He gets exercise by walking and
riding the Trail-a-bike, neither of which is
particularly hard on clothes.
2) We have a gentle washing machine (one of the newer front
loaders) and use small amounts of mild detergent and
no bleach.
3) He's gotten a lot of hand-me-downs from cousins, so does
not wear the same pants over and over.

When I was a child I wore out a lot of knees in pants---I had very
bony knees that put a lot of stress on the pants. Even into my
college years I wore out a lot of knees. Nowadays, my pants are more
likely to fail at the bottom cuffs, or in a line just below the seat
where the edge of the seat of my recumbent bike rubs against the pants
when I pedal.


--
Kevin Karplus http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/~karplus
life member (LAB, Adventure Cycling, American Youth Hostels)
Effective Cycling Instructor #218-ck (lapsed)
Professor of Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
Undergraduate and Graduate Director, Bioinformatics
Affiliations for identification only.