It’s time for one of my most important fatherly duties… Poppy needs to learn to ride a bike. So..  after seeing a few odd looking pedal-less bikes around last year I turned to good old Google for information. It turns out there’s a new and less painful way to learn, the way of the Balance Bike. Riding a bike requires a number of learned skills to be performed all at once. You have the pedals of course needing strength and co-ordination, there’s the all important brakes, you need to steer the thing, and most importantly there’s balance. The story (unverfied and probably not true!) goes that a German family noticed the ability of their 18-month old to scoot along and balance on a two-wheeled toy scooter and thought, “ooh, that’s clever”. The idea was refined in to an actual bike with no pedals and sold in vast numbers. Children were able to quickly pick up the idea of using a balance bike, pushing themselves along with their feet and eventually scooting along with their legs up for further distances. Once they are comfortable with this then most children were given a normal child’s bike without stabilisers and off they went. Stabilisers are a pain in the bum. They are dangerous when cornering and they add an extra learning curve (and tears) when they are removed. Riding a bike with stabilisers teaches bike steering in the wrong way. When you steer a bike, most of the work is done by leaning one way or the other and correcting your balance. Moving the handlebar just increases the curve of your turn. When you ride with stabilisers you are not balancing and turns are based purely on the direction you point the front wheel. Removing stabilisers from a child’s bike means they need to learn to balance whilst pedalling AND learn to balance while steering at the same time… hence the sight of thousands of dads up and down the country during summer months running behind their children holding on to the back of the bike. Crash. Ouch.

I’ve gone for a reasonably priced balance bike for Poppy. She’s only just been given it so I can’t comment on whether or not it works as I hope, but I’ll be certain to post updates on her progress. My intention is to take her to the park at the weekend and see how she copes with a big open space.

If you’d like to read more about balance bikes then check out this article from The Guardian:
The Guardian Kids Cycling Guide

And there are a wealth of articles available advising you on teaching methods. Pretty much all of them suggest starting with either a balance bike, or removing the pedals:
http://www.dad.info/kids/toddlers/teaching-your-child-to-ride-a-bike/
And the general opinion of the parenting community is positive:
http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/8/569624

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Tags: Balance Bike, Cycling, Gadgets, Poppy