Comment by dgacmu

Snap - my son loved his balance bike and would even ride it around the house. We got him a 'good' bicycle (about £140) and he learnt to ride it in about 10 minutes, and same as your child - he rode home and from that moment on he loved his bike.

My daughter never enjoyed or wanted a balance bike, and only gave up her three wheeled scooter about age 7. We tried getting her to cycle a few times, but she couldn't get her head around it. Then last summer she grabbed a 2 wheeled scooter and picked them up quite fast, and the evolution from that to the bicycle seemed pretty easy. We just had to wait until she was ready and interested - I'd tried to encourage her before, but my style for everything now it just to riff off their interests and let them find their place.

Same for swimming, I went swimming with a friend who tried to teach their child 'drills' - which obviously bored them (both). I just let my kids jump in and dive for sinkies - in time (swimming twice a week) they have developed further and further - but they are always up for the pool as they know I'll let them do what they want and focus on having fun.

My neighbor who already knew how to ride a balance bike thought herself how to ride a bike all on her own at 4-5 years old. I was in the hammock watching her roll down a small incline where getting to pedaling is even easier than on a flat. That was an amazing moment watching another human being having an absolutely awesome day. She might be exceptionally good at this though she is now 12 and rides unicycles

Yeah, I used to take our daughter to nursery on her balance bike. I could tell when she started doing little bursts of speed so that she could put her feet up and coast for a while that she had picked up the essentials of balancing.

She did have a bike with stabilisers but she didn't use it much like that as she didn't enjoy it. Between getting "high sided" on bumps and the feeling of falling over before the wheels took the weight.

When her first friend started riding properly she asked me to teach her to ride without stabilisers. I bought one of the push bars from Amazon which was a confidence booster for both of us as I could run behind her and make sure she was safe. It only took 5 minutes before she was riding off on her own. Sadly she got a bit over confident and had a bit of a spill which gave her a bleeding lip which set her back a couple of weeks but the next time she was off without assistance almost immediately.

A few months later she was cycling 10km around the Ile d'oleron in France!

I prayed for long stretches of dry days during the summer when I was a kid, because we had a tree-lined trail with an incline leading to a back field. The trees were such that there was little to no grass on the house side of the trail, so when it dried up nice it would become dusty and loose. My siblings and I would spend all day taking turns ripping down that trail then locking up the brakes to go sliding into the dirt patch, sending up dust clouds and competing to see who could make the biggest.

We kept this up into our teens (bc we were rural way outside of town and our parents were luddites about the internet so we had little else to do after playing all our video games to death) and I got to the point I could drift down the latter portion of the trail and right the bike and ride away without touching the ground. I had moved on to a regular "mountain" bike by my teens so I had to tighten my rear brake and true my wheel so it didn't rub to get enough stopping force to lock out the rear wheel. At one point I was using that move as a core workout lol. (That and side flips on the trampoline.)

You can definitely lock up the rear wheel with hand brakes. Still happens to me semi-regularly purely by accident when I have to stop suddenly.

You can even do 360s with coaster brakes. We wore out many tires at the park down the road from my house. It had a gentle slope that got you up to the perfect speed for coaster break fun on the smooth asphalt entrance road.

You could technically footjam, just need to show the kids enough BMX or fixed gear videos first...

You started out so well, but then it all broke.

It's very true! (about locking the wheel with coaster breaks)

I broke my jaw this way when I was 6 or 7. :-) Tried to do a 90 degree skid going down a steep alley and did an endo, landing on my chin. Do not recommend.

I mean, I probably would have broken some bones anyway with the way I biked at that age, but this particular one might not have happened without the coaster breaks.

We haven't quite gotten to that stage with my 7yo yet. 12yo wasn't too rough on her bike but 7yo is, um, er, let's say he doesn't have the wisdom of being older yet.

While this whole thread is heavily dominated by bashing on training wheels (deservedly so, I can say having tried to teach a full blown 29 year old to ride bikes), this incentive/motivation inversion you mention is interesting.

"Protections/guards" of some kind are so common (not just in software/tech, but all life) that "training wheels" has become a huge metaphor/analogy. I wonder how many other examples there are of the motivation inversion?

My parents taught me to ride by pushing the bike down a small hill with me on it! Lol

Same thing though. I was ruding the bike like a boss pretty quickly.

Usually people get balance bikes for kids that are too small for a normal bike, so they use it for some time before they get tall enough to change (around a year or 2).

A balance bike is a way of transportation for kids, they can use balance bikes for a long time before they are comfortable with biking with pedals. We are talking years with a balance bike and then there is an overlap where they prefer the balance bike.

It is also alot more light weight than a normal bike so it is actually better for you and the kid. I transported a kid and a balance bike easily on a normal bike for more than 20 km, they managed about 10 km on their own.

We got about two years per kid out of it (age 2-4). 4 years of amortized bike for something like $100 seemed pretty good, and it was in good enough shape after that we gave it to a neighbor. It's definitely not a 5 minute thing if used as the primary bike for a child too young for a pedal bike.

> I'm not buying a toy that gets used for 5 minutes only

Round here loads of kindergarten-age kids use their balance bike for transportation every single day. I saw one zooming along behind her/his parent (who was pushing another kid along in a buggy) first thing this morning.

> toy

A toy? The balance bike was our kid's secondary mode of transportation for 2.5 years, after our bike trailer.

How old was your kid? I mean apart from learning to balance itself there is a matter of how strong the thigh muscles are in order to pedal. If your kid was like 5 then it makes sense that it would not be that interesting. If your kid is like 3 or sth, then a balance bike can be a great means of transportation for them. They can use it really a lot and enjoy it, until they can actually pedal on a normal bike in a way that it can be practical. The point of the balance bike is not "to learn balance", but to actually be used for moving around.

Balance bikes are super cheap, very light, and the kid uses it for like a year or more until you are ready to buy the proper bike

We got our kid her balance bike when she was around 1.5, so she used it for almost 2 years. They are not even expensive.

Isla has folded, sadly (though they're still selling replacement parts for now). A shame: their machines really were magnificent. We have also been running through them (mostly second-hand) and selling them on, and it's been a cheap and excellent means of primary transport.

Yes, I see this all the time around my neighborhood, kids get so used to the training wheels, they can just hop off their bike and leave it there while they play some other games. And then they just jump back on the bike. Those bikes can also have all tons of silly accessories, like baskets, ribbons, huge bells, it's not like the kid has to hold the bike upright or learn how to lean it against a wall or on the ground. And then I heard a parent say his kid doesn't want to take off the training wheels, they tried it once for a day and she hated it. Gee, wonder why, now they are waiting for the 5-yearold to tell them when she's ready to take them off. Good luck with that.

The ones in decathlon are great because they have levers designed for smaller hands. We went with rascal bikes, they are expensive but extremely light weight and no coaster brakes, they also have belts so no lubing and no clunky chain guards. I think the idea behind coaster brakes is that kids have weak hands and that it's easier for their brain to only think about what their legs are doing, pedal forwards to go, kick back to break. I know I had them as a kid back in the late 80s and it was fine, even cool. My recent experience with my own kid was opposite to that. We started on a second-hand Specialized Jett 16 with a rear coaster brake (before I realized it was a mistake and ordered the much more expensive Rascal). The coasting brake makes the bike heavy, it prevented her from pulling up the pedal at start and it also confused the hell out of her while pedaling, she would sometimes mistake the direction of pedaling and activate the break, causing her to stumble or fall. It would also be one more thing to unlearn later on.

Oh yes it may very well over half your kid’s weight. These things are ABSURDLY heavy.

This makes starting hard (an already hard problem when learning), it makes falling off worse because there is so much weight pulling down, and then they get pinned under all that weight so it can be hard to get up again. It makes walking the bike uphill physically impossible so if it is hilly you can't actually go out for a ride.

There will be at least some people out there whose road bike weights less than their toddler’s bike.

Half the children seem to have one in France. My neighbourhood is full of them. Draisiennes/laufräder/balancebikes are a real transportation means as children go every single day to the crèche on them. Some Kids that do this know how to ride and can learn to ride a real bike before 3. You then have to find one small enough

Yep, silly old law written by people who don't cycle. It might have had a place 40 years ago, but modern bike brakes are so easy to use (and keep adjusted) that it's at best an anachronism and at worst now a safety hazard in it's own right.

not all kids bikes: only bikes with a maximum seat height between 22 and 25 inches (under 22 inches don't require brakes at all).

in practice, this winds up applying to 14" wheel bikes and maybe some 16" wheel bikes.

definitely a silly rule though.

Yeah, Seth from Berm Peak did a great youtube video about it.