My friend Sara Asche Anderson (@sjaa) posted this:
I need tips on helping my 5yo learn to ride his bike without training wheels. Additionally, how do I get him to trust my advice?
Which reminded me of a story, and it’s longer than 140 characters.
When my son Alex was five or six, he wanted to take the training wheels off his bike, and my (lovely and talented) wife Christina obliged and then spent two hours chasing him down the street holding onto the seat.
She came back into the house sweaty and tired and said “Another couple of days of that and he should be ready to go.”
I looked out the back window to see Alex in the cul-de-sac behind us, riding in circles with the neighbor kid, and said “I don’t think it’s going to take that long.”
I like to imagine that I then took a sip of my bourbon and coke, because that’s the kind of thing that goes with wry, sophisticated humor, but I suspect I’m embellishing.
The secret, which we learned a year or so later when Alex passed it along to his sister Nell, is that you don’t hold the seat. What Matt (the neighbor kid) was doing was simply giving them a shove to start. Kids already know how to pedal, and as long as you don’t stop, you don’t fall.
#protip: You can raise the training wheels so that only one is on the ground at a time – this will encourage the kid to ride fast enough to balance on the main wheel, as riding with one training wheel on the ground will have them going in circles. A week or two of that, assuming moderate bike usage, should be enough to get them used to balancing.
So, in answer to Sara:
To learn to ride a bike, assuming the kid is already capable of maintaining a reasonable speed on a bike, push them. And hold them if they fall. Keep bandaids handy, and advise the wearing of jeans and a helmet.
Getting your kids to trust your advice – let me know if you find out. I’m still working on it.
Do you remember when you first rode without training wheels? I have a vague memory of them falling off about the time you were ready to be done with them.
I learned to ride on a bike that was too small for me. So I didn’t need training wheels.
and recently, I read a bike guru type person say that this is the best way, esp. for an adult but even for kids, to learn.
Then your feet are your training wheel, and your length of body can work for you in terms of
I also had that same “don’t hold onto them to try to ‘help’ them–it just makes it worse” realization when they were learning to walk. If I held their hands, or even if I tried to catch them as they were falling, I would actually *interfere* with their sense of balance.
I try to remind myself of that at all sorts of developmental stages. Only they can figure out what really works. and if I help too much, I throw them off.
Oh–and trusting mom or dad’s advice? That’s what neighborkid and aunts & uncles are for, actually.