8 ms·

Agree with the point of this post. I'd never heard of balance bikes, and then my wife did some research when we had our first kid and found out about this. We'

by dgacmu 2y ago

Agree with the point of this post. I'd never heard of balance bikes, and then my wife did some research when we had our first kid and found out about this. We've now taught both of our kids to bike by starting with a balance bike, and the comparison with their friends who learned with training wheels was amazing - the balance bike kids were zooming around earlier, confidently, and with many fewer spills than the training wheel cohort. Also, you can get a balance bike with a handbrake, which sets them up well for getting a bike with handbrakes instead of coaster brakes. Kids bikes in the US have to be sold with coasters but there are several manufacturers (like woom) who make it really easy to remove the coaster and have front and rear hand brakes. Also also, most kids bikes in the US are too heavy: they're tough and cheap but it makes it hard to control them. Woom and Isla and probably a few others now make aluminum frame bikes for kids that are much more appropriate weight for their sizes, though at a bit of a cost.

sudobash1 2y ago
I remember coaster brakes fondly. As an American kid, all of my bikes had them. What was great about them was that you can engage them so suddenly and forcefully that you instantly lock the rear wheel. If you did that on wet asphalt at high speed and jerk the bike just right, you could spin the bike around 180 degrees or more. It was a great day when I (accidentally) found that out. You can also do that somewhat on dry pavement, but your rear wheel is going to have a reduced lifespan. I think that coaster breaks (and maybe steel frames) are better suited to kids who want to be rough with their bike. My wheels were never very true, and they would have rubbed awfully with rim breaks. (Disk breaks were unheard of on kids bikes then, and I think are still pretty rare now.) The main downside is that if you loose the chain, you loose all breaking power. That happened once to me, but thankfully there was a nice dirt ditch close at hand.
- CRConrad 2y ago
  You started out so well, but then it all broke.
- fnfjfk 2y ago
  You could technically footjam, just need to show the kids enough BMX or fixed gear videos first...
- dgacmu 2y ago
  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.
- hodgesrm 2y ago
  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.
- usefulcat 2y ago
  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.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    Yep, it's a great physics lesson for learning why cars have anti-lock brakes.
- xerox13ster 2y ago
  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.)
yojo 2y ago
Isla discontinued selling in the US. Frog is another UK company that makes cheap and light. Also look at Prevelo or Cleary (slightly heavier). These bikes all hold up well, other than replacing tires and occasionally brake pads. They also hold value well. I’ve been buying/selling used kids bikes on FB as my kids outgrow them, and so far been averaging about $15/year to keep my kids on primo bikes.
- pmyteh 2y ago
  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.
cameron_b 2y ago
The ins and outs of that coaster brake rule provide a lot of wiggle room. My kids started on balance bikes and have moved up to a 12" and 24" ( wheel size ) from Cleary with hand brakes. They missed the regression of coaster brakes and training wheels. Geometry for kids bikes mainly comes down to the scale of the cranks. Small cranks are needed to lower the foot position and center of gravity enough to be 'in scale' with how we tend to consider bike geometry to work, but the shorter cranks also limit the suitability to a shorter leg length, so my kids' Cleary Gecko is pretty small on my 4yo, but she's ridden it for two years. Small kids need smaller components, but it's hard to make small components reliable and cost effective. I really appreciate the folks who took the time to translate the same darn brake levers used all over the world to a size suitable for a 2 year old's hand. They're the cutest thing and they're the first thing I had to teach my son how to use after he was cooking it down hills on the balance bike. They get banged up first on a fall, they get merciless treatment, and they perform the same way I expect mine or any other to perform.
mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
Wait what? “Kids bikes in the US have to be sold with coaster brakes”. Is that true?
- mc3301 2y ago
  Yeah, Seth from Berm Peak did a great youtube video about it.
  - mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
    Oh good god can we not reference random videos by name? If there’s a point to be made then make it and reference the video as a source. I will not do your work for you
    - mc3301 2y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRBiFAbuajU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRBiFAbuajU "The dumbest bike law you've never heard of"
    - renewiltord 2y ago
      Bro, you asked him to do work for you...
    - sojournerc 2y ago
      You typed a comment far longer than the search that would've surfaced the video. Smh
      - 05 2y ago
        But that's the effort that has to be duplicated by all readers of that comment, and reader/commenter ratio is ~10, so.. might as well include the link in everyone's interests..
        sojournerc 2y ago
        Saw this after a week... The Jules saved by sending the link could be measured in hamster farts
lelanthran 2y ago
> We've now taught both of our kids to bike by starting with a balance bike, I looked at the balance bike, thought "what a waste of money" and told my kid "just scoot up and down this level pathway while I fix the pool pump. don't worry about pedaling." and 5 minutes into the pump repair he was balancing just fine. I'm not buying a toy that gets used for 5 minutes only. Whether I can afford it or not is irrelevant.
- benhurmarcel 2y ago
  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).
- pastage 2y ago
  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.
  - lelanthran 2y ago
    > We are talking years with a balance bike and then there is an overlap where they prefer the balance bike. Let me clarify - I'm not saying you can't continue using it for years after. I'm saying there is no point to continuing using it once the kids has developed their balance. That development typically takes only a few dozen minutes, at most. As an analogy, consider reading. Your kid can, after learning to read, continue reading the level-1 (Fun With Dick And Jane type) books for years, but why would you encourage that?
    - matsemann 2y ago
      The point you're missing is that your kid could have played on a balance bike years before it was old enough to be introduced to the real bike.
ccppurcell 2y ago
I have a stepson. We had a balance bike for him; one of his weekends with his dad, his dad got him a bike and he pretty much just started cycling immediately. We bought a bike and he barely needed help. It was pretty remarkable.
throwaway2037 2y ago
Balance bikes are all the rage in Tokyo. I have heard from parents that their kid learned to ride a regular bike in a day or two after pushing around a balancing bike for a couple of years. We agreed that learning to ride a regular bike a kid (without first using a balance bike) was tough!
- azepoi 2y ago
  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
Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago
Yeah, both my wife and myself learned with training wheels (I don't think balance bikes were a think) and it was a rather long process involving being scared, not wanting to remove the training wheels, and having an adult hold us and basically deceive us by releasing when we weren't suspecting. My son had a balance bike when he was around 2 or 3. It then became too small for him. We bought him a normal bike when he was 5. We thought that maybe he would still need training wheels because it had been a few years since he last used the balance bike, but said "let's try without them just in case". He learned to ride in literally less than an hour, without any fears or surprises, and has never fallen so far unless when he gets cocky and thinks he can ride behind very slow pedestrians at like 1 km/h.
lqet 2y ago
We were also skeptical, but bought a used Puky balance bike [0] for our daughter when she was 1,5. It cost 20 EUR and basically had everything a normal bike has (brakes, added reflectors, bell) and she was able to use it for longer distances (2 km to daycare) very quickly and safely. This was a huge benefit for us, as walking this distance was usually an endless litany of "don't wanna walk, carry me please, take me on your shoulders please, etc", and a 2 year also doesn't really like sitting in a stroller anymore. When she was 4, we bought her a regular bike. The "learning process" went like this: I told her "it's like your old bike, but with pedals to drive faster". She sat on it, used it like a balance bike for 3 rounds in our driveway, and then started to test the pedals. After literally 5 minutes, I went for a drive with her through our neighborhood. We were completely flabbergasted. It took both me and my wife 2 long Sunday afternoons with our dads in a large parking space to learn to ride a bike. We both started with training wheels when we were 2. [0] https://www.gigasport.de/puky-laufrad-12-lr-1l-br-pink-7292806.html https://www.gigasport.de/puky-laufrad-12-lr-1l-br-pink-72928...
- nasmorn 2y ago
  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
  - ljf 2y ago
    The incline makes it so much easier for sure! I got my kids going on a slight hill that was covered in grass so they weren't so fearful to fall off.
- ljf 2y ago
  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.
kvgr 2y ago
Training wheels are horrible thing. When i was a little kid i didn't want to let go of them. One day my mother removed them, hold me by my shirt collar and told me to pedal. At the end of the day I was riding like a boss. As the author said, training wheels are learning backwards. You learn to pedal, but not to ride. You need to ride, then learn to pedal. And the motivation is also positive: removing training wheels is bad, cause you will fall. Adding pedals is good, because it allows you to go faster.
- hunter-gatherer 2y ago
  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.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    Actually that is what we use to teach adults how to ride bikes. They get it much better if they get used to push the bicycle for a couple of hours, plus mounting dismounting it in a standstill. It teaches them they can control it and it doesn't appear like some external contraption whose sole purpose is to make them crash.
    - wing-_-nuts 2y ago
      I'm an adult with cerebral palsy and it's been a lifelong dream of mine to learn how to ride a bike as an adult. I feel like I may have just enough balance to make it work. My biggest problem with learning to ride a bike is they seem to assume the user has a certain amount of flexibility and range of motion. Also in order for me to have 'feet on the ground' I have to be off the seat. If I'm off the seat all of a sudden I'm straddling a massive metal crossbrace that's uncomfortably close to 'the boys'. This post has me wanting to find a women's cruiser and remove the pedals. I'm ~ 5'10" I should be able to find a bike where I can easily touch the ground from the saddle
      - nayuki 2y ago
prmoustache 2y ago
> We've now taught both of our kids to bike by starting with a balance bike, and the comparison with their friends who learned with training wheels was amazing There is actually a third way. Learn to ride a bike the correct way first time. It is not that hard, I got it in a few minutes when I was a kid. The thing is it can't be easy if you have used trainer wheels before because trainer wheels teach you stuff you have to unlearn first. Note: I am not arguing about the merit of the balance bike. A balance bike is indeed faster for a small 2-3y old kid than a bike is at that age anyway. But most of the benefits of a balance bike is less to teach balance than to put the idea of trainer wheels away from parents.
- dsego 2y ago
  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.
p0ckets 2y ago
I always wondered why almost all the kids bikes sold in Canada have coaster brakes. I actually thought all kids bikes had coaster brakes until I saw some at Decathlon with hand brakes (turns out it's a French company).
- dsego 2y ago
  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.
analog31 2y ago
The typical quality of kids bikes in the US is appalling. I wouldn't trust a bike made with hand brakes unless I could adjust and maintain them myself, which I can. But a lot of parents can't. And the weight is inexplicable, given how much smaller they are.
- rsch 2y ago
  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.
  - dsego 2y ago
    My kid's first bike with pedals was the Specialized Jett 16" at 8-9kg, that's absurd. Her newer bike is a more reasonable 5.6kg.
dsego 2y ago
Same here, balance bike straight to pedal bike at 3 years old. No training wheels, she managed to learn in a span of a day or two. It took some more time to learn to brake with front levers and that's it. And the back pedal coaster brakes were just confusing, she would unknowingly start pedaling backwards and it prevented her from pulling the pedal up to start propelling (later on she would learn to push off or just sit on the bicycle and get started). We started on a 12" kokua likeabike jumper before the age of 2 and later converted to a lightweight 16" rascal bike (great czech brand that delivers across europe). The coaster brakes where on a specialized jett 16 and we ditched this boat anchor quickly. Now she is 4.5 and she can do a 12km ride with me, we even do climbs with a shotgun tow rope because her bike is single speed.
CRConrad 2y ago
> Woom and Isla and probably a few others now make aluminum frame bikes for kids that are much more appropriate weight for their sizes, though at a bit of a cost. I remember coming across Isla while researching online for my kid's second bike, but sheee! were they expensive.

by dgacmu 2y ago

sudobash1 2y ago

I remember coaster brakes fondly. As an American kid, all of my bikes had them. What was great about them was that you can engage them so suddenly and forcefully that you instantly lock the rear wheel. If you did that on wet asphalt at high speed and jerk the bike just right, you could spin the bike around 180 degrees or more. It was a great day when I (accidentally) found that out. You can also do that somewhat on dry pavement, but your rear wheel is going to have a reduced lifespan. I think that coaster breaks (and maybe steel frames) are better suited to kids who want to be rough with their bike. My wheels were never very true, and they would have rubbed awfully with rim breaks. (Disk breaks were unheard of on kids bikes then, and I think are still pretty rare now.) The main downside is that if you loose the chain, you loose all breaking power. That happened once to me, but thankfully there was a nice dirt ditch close at hand.

CRConrad 2y ago
You started out so well, but then it all broke.
fnfjfk 2y ago
You could technically footjam, just need to show the kids enough BMX or fixed gear videos first...
dgacmu 2y ago
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.
hodgesrm 2y ago
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.
usefulcat 2y ago
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.
- kibwen 2y ago
  Yep, it's a great physics lesson for learning why cars have anti-lock brakes.
xerox13ster 2y ago
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.)

yojo 2y ago

Isla discontinued selling in the US. Frog is another UK company that makes cheap and light. Also look at Prevelo or Cleary (slightly heavier). These bikes all hold up well, other than replacing tires and occasionally brake pads. They also hold value well. I’ve been buying/selling used kids bikes on FB as my kids outgrow them, and so far been averaging about $15/year to keep my kids on primo bikes.

pmyteh 2y ago
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.

cameron_b 2y ago

The ins and outs of that coaster brake rule provide a lot of wiggle room. My kids started on balance bikes and have moved up to a 12" and 24" ( wheel size ) from Cleary with hand brakes. They missed the regression of coaster brakes and training wheels. Geometry for kids bikes mainly comes down to the scale of the cranks. Small cranks are needed to lower the foot position and center of gravity enough to be 'in scale' with how we tend to consider bike geometry to work, but the shorter cranks also limit the suitability to a shorter leg length, so my kids' Cleary Gecko is pretty small on my 4yo, but she's ridden it for two years. Small kids need smaller components, but it's hard to make small components reliable and cost effective. I really appreciate the folks who took the time to translate the same darn brake levers used all over the world to a size suitable for a 2 year old's hand. They're the cutest thing and they're the first thing I had to teach my son how to use after he was cooking it down hills on the balance bike. They get banged up first on a fall, they get merciless treatment, and they perform the same way I expect mine or any other to perform.

mattclarkdotnet 2y ago

Wait what? “Kids bikes in the US have to be sold with coaster brakes”. Is that true?

mc3301 2y ago
Yeah, Seth from Berm Peak did a great youtube video about it.
- mattclarkdotnet 2y ago
  Oh good god can we not reference random videos by name? If there’s a point to be made then make it and reference the video as a source. I will not do your work for you
  - mc3301 2y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRBiFAbuajU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRBiFAbuajU "The dumbest bike law you've never heard of"
  - renewiltord 2y ago
    Bro, you asked him to do work for you...
  - sojournerc 2y ago
    You typed a comment far longer than the search that would've surfaced the video. Smh
    - 05 2y ago
      But that's the effort that has to be duplicated by all readers of that comment, and reader/commenter ratio is ~10, so.. might as well include the link in everyone's interests..
      - sojournerc 2y ago
        Saw this after a week... The Jules saved by sending the link could be measured in hamster farts

lelanthran 2y ago

> We've now taught both of our kids to bike by starting with a balance bike, I looked at the balance bike, thought "what a waste of money" and told my kid "just scoot up and down this level pathway while I fix the pool pump. don't worry about pedaling." and 5 minutes into the pump repair he was balancing just fine. I'm not buying a toy that gets used for 5 minutes only. Whether I can afford it or not is irrelevant.

benhurmarcel 2y ago
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).
pastage 2y ago
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.
- lelanthran 2y ago
  > We are talking years with a balance bike and then there is an overlap where they prefer the balance bike. Let me clarify - I'm not saying you can't continue using it for years after. I'm saying there is no point to continuing using it once the kids has developed their balance. That development typically takes only a few dozen minutes, at most. As an analogy, consider reading. Your kid can, after learning to read, continue reading the level-1 (Fun With Dick And Jane type) books for years, but why would you encourage that?
  - matsemann 2y ago
    The point you're missing is that your kid could have played on a balance bike years before it was old enough to be introduced to the real bike.

ccppurcell 2y ago

I have a stepson. We had a balance bike for him; one of his weekends with his dad, his dad got him a bike and he pretty much just started cycling immediately. We bought a bike and he barely needed help. It was pretty remarkable.

throwaway2037 2y ago

Balance bikes are all the rage in Tokyo. I have heard from parents that their kid learned to ride a regular bike in a day or two after pushing around a balancing bike for a couple of years. We agreed that learning to ride a regular bike a kid (without first using a balance bike) was tough!

azepoi 2y ago
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

Al-Khwarizmi 2y ago

Yeah, both my wife and myself learned with training wheels (I don't think balance bikes were a think) and it was a rather long process involving being scared, not wanting to remove the training wheels, and having an adult hold us and basically deceive us by releasing when we weren't suspecting. My son had a balance bike when he was around 2 or 3. It then became too small for him. We bought him a normal bike when he was 5. We thought that maybe he would still need training wheels because it had been a few years since he last used the balance bike, but said "let's try without them just in case". He learned to ride in literally less than an hour, without any fears or surprises, and has never fallen so far unless when he gets cocky and thinks he can ride behind very slow pedestrians at like 1 km/h.

lqet 2y ago

We were also skeptical, but bought a used Puky balance bike [0] for our daughter when she was 1,5. It cost 20 EUR and basically had everything a normal bike has (brakes, added reflectors, bell) and she was able to use it for longer distances (2 km to daycare) very quickly and safely. This was a huge benefit for us, as walking this distance was usually an endless litany of "don't wanna walk, carry me please, take me on your shoulders please, etc", and a 2 year also doesn't really like sitting in a stroller anymore. When she was 4, we bought her a regular bike. The "learning process" went like this: I told her "it's like your old bike, but with pedals to drive faster". She sat on it, used it like a balance bike for 3 rounds in our driveway, and then started to test the pedals. After literally 5 minutes, I went for a drive with her through our neighborhood. We were completely flabbergasted. It took both me and my wife 2 long Sunday afternoons with our dads in a large parking space to learn to ride a bike. We both started with training wheels when we were 2. [0] https://www.gigasport.de/puky-laufrad-12-lr-1l-br-pink-7292806.html https://www.gigasport.de/puky-laufrad-12-lr-1l-br-pink-72928...

nasmorn 2y ago
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
- ljf 2y ago
  The incline makes it so much easier for sure! I got my kids going on a slight hill that was covered in grass so they weren't so fearful to fall off.
ljf 2y ago
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.

kvgr 2y ago

Training wheels are horrible thing. When i was a little kid i didn't want to let go of them. One day my mother removed them, hold me by my shirt collar and told me to pedal. At the end of the day I was riding like a boss. As the author said, training wheels are learning backwards. You learn to pedal, but not to ride. You need to ride, then learn to pedal. And the motivation is also positive: removing training wheels is bad, cause you will fall. Adding pedals is good, because it allows you to go faster.

hunter-gatherer 2y ago
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.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  Actually that is what we use to teach adults how to ride bikes. They get it much better if they get used to push the bicycle for a couple of hours, plus mounting dismounting it in a standstill. It teaches them they can control it and it doesn't appear like some external contraption whose sole purpose is to make them crash.
  - wing-_-nuts 2y ago
    I'm an adult with cerebral palsy and it's been a lifelong dream of mine to learn how to ride a bike as an adult. I feel like I may have just enough balance to make it work. My biggest problem with learning to ride a bike is they seem to assume the user has a certain amount of flexibility and range of motion. Also in order for me to have 'feet on the ground' I have to be off the seat. If I'm off the seat all of a sudden I'm straddling a massive metal crossbrace that's uncomfortably close to 'the boys'. This post has me wanting to find a women's cruiser and remove the pedals. I'm ~ 5'10" I should be able to find a bike where I can easily touch the ground from the saddle
    - nayuki 2y ago

prmoustache 2y ago

> We've now taught both of our kids to bike by starting with a balance bike, and the comparison with their friends who learned with training wheels was amazing There is actually a third way. Learn to ride a bike the correct way first time. It is not that hard, I got it in a few minutes when I was a kid. The thing is it can't be easy if you have used trainer wheels before because trainer wheels teach you stuff you have to unlearn first. Note: I am not arguing about the merit of the balance bike. A balance bike is indeed faster for a small 2-3y old kid than a bike is at that age anyway. But most of the benefits of a balance bike is less to teach balance than to put the idea of trainer wheels away from parents.

dsego 2y ago
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.

p0ckets 2y ago

I always wondered why almost all the kids bikes sold in Canada have coaster brakes. I actually thought all kids bikes had coaster brakes until I saw some at Decathlon with hand brakes (turns out it's a French company).

dsego 2y ago
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.

analog31 2y ago

The typical quality of kids bikes in the US is appalling. I wouldn't trust a bike made with hand brakes unless I could adjust and maintain them myself, which I can. But a lot of parents can't. And the weight is inexplicable, given how much smaller they are.

rsch 2y ago
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.
- dsego 2y ago
  My kid's first bike with pedals was the Specialized Jett 16" at 8-9kg, that's absurd. Her newer bike is a more reasonable 5.6kg.

dsego 2y ago

Same here, balance bike straight to pedal bike at 3 years old. No training wheels, she managed to learn in a span of a day or two. It took some more time to learn to brake with front levers and that's it. And the back pedal coaster brakes were just confusing, she would unknowingly start pedaling backwards and it prevented her from pulling the pedal up to start propelling (later on she would learn to push off or just sit on the bicycle and get started). We started on a 12" kokua likeabike jumper before the age of 2 and later converted to a lightweight 16" rascal bike (great czech brand that delivers across europe). The coaster brakes where on a specialized jett 16 and we ditched this boat anchor quickly. Now she is 4.5 and she can do a 12km ride with me, we even do climbs with a shotgun tow rope because her bike is single speed.

CRConrad 2y ago

> Woom and Isla and probably a few others now make aluminum frame bikes for kids that are much more appropriate weight for their sizes, though at a bit of a cost. I remember coming across Isla while researching online for my kid's second bike, but sheee! were they expensive.