OK, that’s today’s topic! Now, go to it. …Well, I should add my son is 9 years old with many unfounded fears. How do I even get him to try? Recently, his Cub Scout den did an activity on bike riding. I was tempted to let him embarrassed in front of all the other kids (none of which had training wheels by this age)/ However, I don’t want to
scar him for life. He was allowed to use his (human-powered) scooter claiming his bike was rusted out.
Take the training wheels off. In my experience, that’s the only thing that works. If he really wants to ride his bike, he’ll choose to learn how to do so.
And provide feedback and positive reinforcement and all that.
Bicycles are inherently stable - if they’re in motion.
The tried and true method is son/daughter pedaling on bike (training wheels off) and you running alongside with hand on the back of the seat. Once forward motion / inertia is achieved, let go! Cheer! Buy pizza!
Ask him what his plan is. Not in an accusatory way, just an information gathering one. He may have the answer for you, saving you a lot of time and anguish. If he says he doesn’t have a plan, ask him if he’d like help making one (perhaps getting him his own toolkit so he can take them off himself, or taking him out to a private place so he can get the feel of riding without them without being a public spectacle, or, if he’s 9, he may be about to grow into the next size up bike anyhow, and that one just doesn’t come with training wheels.)
But let it be his plan and his power. This isn’t your problem. This is his problem (if he even considers it a problem), and with your guidance, he’s perfectly capable of solving it himself. Letting him solve it himself instead of solving it for him will lead to an actual increase in real self-esteem and problem solving skills, which will give him the experience to solve bigger more complex problems in the future.
Well, I let him ride around a bit with the training wheels still on just to get the feel of the bike (which he hasn’t ridden in quite awhile). With today’s cheap training wheels mostly worn away, he was already learning to balance on one training wheel. Then, I took one away…then the next…and he was off! Hesitant but triumphant, he did it!
One tip for others in the same boat: Make sure the seat and handle bars are at the proper height. At first, both were too low for him, and he was fighting against the physical constraints of being somewhat cramped on his bike until I made the proper adjustments.
We found that taking off the training wheels and the pedals worked best. They scooted the bikes with their feet and learnt to balance. Once they were comfortable with that we put the pedals back on and they were off.
My youngest daughter demanded that the training wheels come off at 3 YO. Why? Because her 6 and 9 YO siblings didn’t use training wheels. Peer pressure can be a good thing.
However my youngest daughter’s case might have been an anomaly. She won the women’s division in a 24-hour bicycle race with 355 miles at 18 YO and came in second at college cycling championships at 20 YO.
Exactly. I taught my son how to ride without training wheels - I just ran alongside holding the handlebars or seat, letting go for longer and longer lengths of time. It was exhausting, and running while bent over wasn’t great for my back, but it worked.
It’s simple, really - you don’t need to teach kids how to pedal and steer. They do that automatically. What needs to be taught is balance, and that can’t be done with training wheels on. The only thing *they *do is ruin a kid’s confidence.
I guess I don’t know anything about modern kids. I would have thought showing up at a bike event on a scooter would be more embarrassing than training wheels.
Yes. This is how my dad taught not only me and my sisters, but countless other neighborhood kids. (I came from the go-to family for bike advice. My maternal grandpa was the local Schwinn dealer, and my dad (and later me) worked for him as teenagers. (That’s how he met my mom.) It rarely took more than a 3 or 4 runs for a kid to get the hang of it, and then maybe 30-60 minutes of solo time to get comfortable with it. The key (and this worked with my daughters) is to let go when you can feel them balancing themselves but keep running with them with your hand behind them so they don’t know they’re on their own.