Apparently this guys is unaware that pedalless balance bikes for kids already exist, and are quite popular. The idea is to get kids used to doing the hard part--staying balanced--first, then when they get a 'real' bike, they don't need training wheels, or at least, not so much.
You might be interested to learn that bicycles initially didn't have pedals or a drivetrain[1].
They were ridden exactly the way you're teaching your kid. Adding pedals later is just following the history of bicycle tech development.
Velocipede, the French word for that vehicle, remained being the word for "bicycle" in several languages.
I guess if there's any moral to this, it's that learning history makes a lot of things far less surprising — and makes a lot of what we have today far more meaningful.
Or: one doesn't really understand something without knowing its history (and the best way to find gaps in your own understanding is to teach or explain the concept to someone else).
Using the metaphor of your post: to find out what are the "pedals" to take off, learn about how the "bicycle" came to be before explaining it to others.
I'd say through about 90% of the post I was wondering if you'd really not heard about balance bikes. It was only at the end that I realized the point of the story was the power of looking for more options.
One wonders how many HN commenters stepped out before that conclusion was given. Adopting BLUF[1] may help in that regard!
You see them everywhere in Holland, e.g. this one
https://www.veloretti.com/products/mini-kids
Of course, putting the pedals back on can be difficult with these...
> Apparently this guys is unaware that pedal-less balance bikes for kids already exist, and are quite popular.
Author here. This was the point of the post -- but fwiw I did in fact learn about pedal-less bikes shortly after I learned about the "take the pedals off" method. I figured if I went forty years without learning about this, how many of my other peers did too? [1] These bikes were not available when I was a kid, and never came on my radar for any of my three young children until now.
The other point of the post is to make the connection that if this obvious-in-retrospect method makes teaching something difficult easier in this domain, how many other domains am I missing applying a similar method to, no matter how "obvious" ?
[1] I guess I was just one of today's lucky 10,000 https://xkcd.com/1053/