Teaching a child to ride a bike

josip

Not sure if this is the best forum, but I'm still buzzing after yesterday so I have to post somewhere. This is a rambling emotional/experience dump, so if you're doing anyhting remotely useful, please skip.

TLDR - Woohooo!

Our 3, almost 4, year old has been learning to ride a bike on and off for the last 8 months.
The trike we got him a few years ago was too kludgy and he never really got into pedalling.
The balance bike we got him when he was 2 was big enough, but the seat pillar wasn't very long so it was a bit low for him.
So we decided last November to get him a bike, mainly to get him started on pedalling.
He's a bit lighter than average so we got him a cnoc. They're more expensive than an average kid's bike, but have a very good rep.
We planned to stat him off on stabilizers, but their website and a few other places recommended trying to get them to learn without them. Madness I thought, but after thinking about it, it made sense not to learn to ride a bike one way (with stabilizers), and then to have to forget that way and learn a new way later.
But I did think that 3 years old was very young to learn. I was 6 before I started with stabilizers and 7 before I took them off. That was a generation ago, and I was probably a bit behind the curve, but getting a 3 year old to learn was daunting.
So over the winter and for the last few months we've been going out on average every 2 weeks. I had hoped for weekly, but weather/work/trips/play means that we didn't get out as much as I'd hoped.
The website said that at some stage between the age of 3 and 4, it will "click" about how to ride a bike, not to force it or put pressure on the kid.
I would walk/trot beside him with a hand under each armpit, not holding him up, but an inch either side, so that he could lean over and back but not rely on me to hold him up. I'm 6' 3" so my back didn't look too kindly on running along for half an hour stooped over.
Winter wasn't too bad. With a heavy coat and gloves, he was well padded and I thought that even if I did let him fall he wouldn't be scraped. The onset of spring with shorts and t-shirts did increase the tension levels somewhat.
He picked up pedalling after a week. In the security of not having to worry about falling he'd do a full check on all the bike's equipment as we went along.
Freewheel? check. Bell? check. Steering - lock to lock 6 times a second? check. Emergency braking? check. The last one was incredibly tiring. You're completely focused on keeping up with him, your hands in position, bent over and suddenly he sticks it to the footpath and you have to stop yourself running over him.

4th birthday is next week. At this stage I was resigned to being the local "scrooge who didn't want to pay for the stabilizers". When neighbours would ask me why we didn't get stabilizers and I told them that we did have them, but were trying to learn without them, I was confirmed as the local nutter.
So yesterday evening we went out again. Sometimes as we go along, if I got him finely balanced, he wouldn't veer off and need my support for 10 metres, but there wasn't any corrective steering going on and sometimes he wouldn't be pedalling.

We had one of those 10 metres early on yesterday, they often happen on slight downhills. But just 10m. On our way back, this time on a slight uphill, he got balanced again and got 10 metres. And then just when he'd normally overbalance and my hand would support him, there was a slight turn of the handlebars and he was still going. And then a few metres later he did it again in the other direction and kept pedalling. He kept that up for 30 metres in total before my hands were needed again. He'd f**king nailed it! Cue warm fuzzy moment, high fiving and whooping. He did two more 30 metre stints on the way back to the car so it wasn't a one off. He still needs my hands fairly often, but we'll get out more over the next few weeks to keep up the momentum and I hope the 30 metres will soon become 50 metres.

If anyone is doing or thinking of doing the same, my advice would be

• Get a good bike. The cnoc is lightweigt aluminium with everything properly proportioned.
• Winter time can be easier to learn than summer time with the extra padding.
• Some days they just won't want to go more than 2 minutes. Accept it. I should have taken this advice a few times.
• Our guy seemed to get it better on the slight uphills, because having to pedal "enforced" a rhythm and the corrective steer, that he doesn't get on the downhills.
• Try it in a park with a tarmac track rather than on footpaths. Footpaths are too irregular.
• Go out as often as you can. In hindsight, we should have been out twice a week and he probably would have picked it up sooner.
• Your role is just a minder to stop them falling. Let them experiment a bit, even if it looks like they're just messing. All those minutes on the bike do accumulate and are useful.
• 3 is not too early to start and it 's easier to motivate them if they haven't been out with their stabilized friends yet. Once they see their friends with stabilizers flying along it takes a bit of convincing that in the longer term what they are trying to do might be the better approach. Long term for a 3 year old is what he's going to do when he gets back to the house.
• Celebrate with ice cream and photos when it does happen.

Germancarfan

Nice work. My (then) 4 year old dropped her stabilisers just before her 5th birthday and has been flying since. She nagged me to get rid of them as she said they were holding her back. Within 5 mins of taking them off and a firm hand on her back she was gone.

She's had a balance bike since very young and I attribute it to that. She's also a nut case on he Flickr so has good balance. Within 2 days she was bombing round the cul de sac and jumping of the curbs. Her mother can't look at her as she gets to nervous
She's had a few tumbles but learns from them and I haven't sen her do the same thing twice. She'll cycle to the local shops alongside me now no bother (at low speeds obviously)

Need to get her a bigger bike next.

I've an older fella (6 going non 7) and getting it hard to take his off. We did once and he fell (naturally) as we had done a bit and he pushed on and now he wont' go back without them at all. Need to work on him to get him motivated for it. Would love to be able to go to the local park with them both on the bikes

fat bloke

Balance bikes are the job. After that the one piece of advice I'd give parents running after their wobbly kids is to hold the kid, not the bike!
If you've your hand on the saddle or the bars the kid isn't in control whereas if you grab a fist of t-shirt to hold and redirect the kid as you run along then he is learning how the bike moves underneath him and is actually controlling the thing

BoardsMember

Balance bikes are great for younger kids.

Stabilisers are made by the devil and have no place on a bike!!

Neither of mine used stabilisers, both loved the balance bike and were like madmen on it. Stabilisers only take confidence and technique from kids, and ensure they go slow and wobble and fall. Keep them on a balance bike until you want them on proper bike, then stick them on a proper bike.

Sinbad_NI

Our girl just sorted it out this weekend... think we (me) had overloaded her with tips, advice and instructions... in the end the best advice seemed to be "don't think about it, just do it". She's flying now.

doozerie

Our daughter grew to love her balance bike but she was only a few weeks shy of her 5th birthday before she finally took to her pedal bike. It was a very conscious decision on her part, we put no pressure on her as we were sure it would not help her at all and would actually be counter-productive. There were points in time where we wondered whether her pedal bike would ever see the light of day, but it has all worked out incredibly well - she is having fun on her bike now, and we are delighted.

In her case the lack of stabilisers was mostly a positive thing from the start, she looked at other kids using stabilisers, some of them older than her, and mentioned with what seemed like pride that her bike had none. This was before she finally decided to actually ride it, mind you, but it seemed to give her some extra motivation to learn the skill of cycling without stabilisers.

JMcL

Congrats, it's a joyful thing watching them do it!

Our daughter had a balance bike from just after her 3rd birthday and took to it like a duck to water. We got her a bike for her 4th birthday and hid the stabilisers ("No sweetie, the man in the shop didn't have any little wheels"). As it turns out, she didn't take to it immediately as despite it being a small bike, she's quite petite, and wasn't comfortable getting both feet on the ground. We didn't make a fuss (plus her birthday is in the middle of winter, cue sh1te weather) and with another 6 months on her about this time last year she decided she was ready. First time out on a crowded prom in Tramore on a glorious summer Sunday she flew it, only needing the minimum of holding. The first day out she was very stop/start (she'd gotten the hang of the brakes on the balance bike) because of the crowds, but by the third spin she was making her way among them not a bother.

So to reinforce your own experience and what most of the rest have said, start off with a balance bike (or take the pedals off a proper bike - though balance bike is much lighter for when you inevitably end up having to carry it home), and when progressing to a bike proper, ban the stabilisers

check_six

We used stabilisers at first and gradually moved the stabilisers up in their bracket so that maybe only one was touching the ground at a time. The stabilisers were noisy when in contact with the ground so my lad could tell when he was cycling without their help when it all went silent at the back of the bike. He'd been doing plenty of cycling before we got around to having an afternoon to practice without the stabilisers.

I lowered the saddle and suggested he should practice pushing himself around with his feet before moving on to actual pedalling. The response I got was "You mean like this?" as he pedalled away unaided immediately.

He'd been cycling every day to school so it should have come as no surprise, but I was impressed just how quickly the transition took place.

If I could do it over again, I'd probably ditch the stabilisers sooner, maybe do the no pedals thing from the start. The stabilisers are pretty unhelpful once the kid can move at anything over walking pace, as any bump in the road will throw them off. A tree root on the path flung my lad into the ground at one point with a handlebar in the face added in for good measure, which wasn't much fun.

bambergbike

Peppa Pig has stabilisers and a tonne of influence - I think the waiting game doozerie describes is probably the best way to try and withstand it. Once you have a child whizzing along under their own steam on a balance bike, you're in a happy place anyway -you could probably wait there for years before it started to drive you mad. You're no longer condemned to pushing a buggy (at least not that child's buggy) or to walking at a glacial pace with a child trailing along behind randomly demanding carries. And there's an awful lot of learning going on which will come in handy later at higher speeds - riding a bike is as much about interacting successfully with other people as it about the motor skills. So I reckon people can hold off on the upgrade (or serial upgrades - first one pedal, then the other?) until the child is ready. Even when the child has made the leap, the balance bike might still be the choice for some more difficult journeys.

Timid children are probably ready for pedals when they say so, brave ones when they have demonstrated some minimal capacity to heed instructions. Children travelling faster than the maximum speed at which they can apply their common sense or heed instructions cause too many heart-stopping moments. Even with a fairly compliant three-year old on a balance bike, I have to concentrate quite hard and issue a raft of instructions to get the two of us from my house to the playground to the shops and back home again. I remember a granny walking with two sticks nervously peering over her glasses down at the child and saying "I hope you're not about to run over my toes, are you?"

Being able to pedal is great fun and worth a huge celebration, of course, but being able to balance-bike along crowded pavements to the creche or the supermarket (keeping an eye out for other people and an ear out for important instructions) is no less useful a life-skill and also worth celebrating.

dave2pvd

"A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker can have". You know where that comes from right?

Well, the towel also works well when teaching your kid balance on a bike.

Place the towel across the kid's chest and run the ends up behind the arms. Voila, you have a sling. Supporting your child this way may actually speed up the learning of balance. My daughter learned this way. I also taught her (very timid) best friend. Worked like a charm.