At work, if I find myself explaining a topic multiple times, I decide to write it down on wiki so that I can give a quick summary and then just link to the wiki for more details. Lately, I've been finding myself relating the same story multiple times, so I figure I'd go with the same strategy outside of work.
This is going to be about how Leon learned to ride a pedal bike, without training wheels, at age three and a half. I think I didn't know how to ride a bike without training wheels until I was eight or something.
Current best practice regarding teaching kids how to ride a bike goes something like this:
- The hardest part of riding a bike is the balancing and steering, which actually has nothing to do with pedaling and can be done safely and early with a balance bike, which is pretty much a bike without pedals or brakes and depends solely on a person's feet.
We got Leon a balance bike (a Strider) at age 2. He mostly walked around with it rather than actually balancing or coasting until he was 3 or so. The best way to learn coasting is to find a gentle downhill incline. - Kids that use balance bikes are used to being able to move their feet forward and backward and thus have a hard time dealing with coaster brakes (i.e. a brake that engages by pedaling backwards). So, a balance bike kid should switch to a bike without coaster brakes.
Because the CPSC requires bikes below a certain size have coaster brakes, it can be tricky to find a small bike with hand brakes and no coaster brake. The Woom 2 comes with a coaster brake due to the CPSC requirement, but the company sells a freewheel kit for cheap because they believe the CPSC requirement to be outdated. We bought a used Woom 2 that still had the coaster brake and Leon did indeed have a lot of trouble not accidentally engaging the brake. So we bought the freewheel kit and it worked out a lot better. - It can be very helpful to remove the pedals from the bike at first to treat it as a balance bike with hand brakes. Most balance bikes don't have hand brakes, so this means that the kid is learning one thing at a time, in this case, using the hand brake.
We definitely did this for Leon and had him get used to balancing on the new bike going down hills and learning to use the hand brake. - There is no training wheels step, because learning how to balance and steer was dealt with in step 1. I think it took roughly a month or two for Leon to learn to use the pedal bike.
Some other miscellaneous tips:
- Personally, I recommend biking gloves in addition to a helmet both because kids usually find them cool and I want to minimize the chance of an injury putting a kid off of wanting to learn how to ride. You are way more likely to fall on onto your hands than head, though of course the head is more important to protect.
- A lot of kids bikes are very heavy and thus may be less fun to use. Woom makes some pretty quality kids bikes. They aren't cheap, but they're also reasonably easy to buy used and sell for around the same cost.
Since I really enjoy cycling, I really wanted to maximize the chance of Leon enjoying it and having family cycling trips. I'm happy to say that he does enjoy his time on the bike and that he learned way earlier than I did.
Here's a video for the first time Leon managed to pedal on the bike for more than a few seconds!