Yeah, its a little late to learn now. I pushed my kids to learn young (by six or seven) because its one of those skills that if you don’t know how to do it, you can get left behind by your friends. Bike riding, skiing and swimming were all on my list of “skills to pick up young because they are harder to pick up old, and you don’t want to get left out.” (Swimming is also a safety thing) And they are all skills that once you get basic competence at it, you are likely to keep at least SOME level of skill with it through adulthood. But at 13, if he hasn’t felt left out of “lets all bike up to the park” he isn’t likely to miss it and has gotten to the age where its his problem if he discovers that a bike would be a convenient and cheap way to get around.
I don’t agree that it’s too late to learn.
I have to agree with GMANCANADA even though I think 13 is a tough age to work through this. It’s just a difficult age to deal with.
However, thinking back, my mother insisted I take typing in summer school at that age. This was well before home computers but she saw it coming. You can imagine how popular that went over with me but I did it because it was expected of me just as other scholastic disciplines were.
I know I’m from an older generation but riding a bike is considered a fundamental skill and ranks close to eating with utensils. It’s almost a non-skill.
Oh for pete’s sake. Just because you don’t force your child to learn to ride a bike doesn’t mean that you are condoning a sedentary lifestyle. IMO, one of the greatest gifts you can give your child is exposure to a variety of activities so that they can figure out what they ENJOY doing. Enjoyment is the key to maintaining an active lifestyle.
When they were little, I allowed my kids pick ONE activity per season, whether it be dance, gymnastics, tennis, karate or soccer…whatever floated their boat. My only caveats were that it couldn’t require traveling, and it could never interfere with our family time at the lake.
The only lesson I ever FORCED them to take was swimming and that’s because knowing how to swim can actually mean the difference between life and death.
@PunditLisa
So when your kid says “No, I don’t want any activites this season, I just want to play video games and hang with my friends.” You just back off and said “That’s cool.” Seriously??
Oh, for Pete’s sake, right back at you. You sound like you have your shit together, so I have trouble believing that you’d let the monkeys start running the circus.
My kids and most of those kids I know, have their default setting to not doing new things because that’s the mental and physical path of least resistance. I believe that as a parent you need to actively fight that default desire, especially when it comes to life skills (which you seem to agree with, except that for you riding a bike is not an important skill?)
I forced my daughter to learn to drive when she turned 16. She had absolutely no desire and actively fought me. We lived in mid-town Toronto: OK transit, lots in the area & could walk everywhere, none of her friends drove, she could ride her bike if she needed etc etc.
She could never imagine a life where she could possibly need to drive. Just like the OP’s son can’t imagine a life scenario where he’d have a need to ride a bike. As and adult wth 30 more years of life experience, I’m 100% confident saying “Yes, there will be situations in which the ability to drive a car or ride a bike will be a good thing to know.”
My daughter thanked me just last week for forcing her. She’s now at UBC in Vancouver. The university is in the middle of nowhere, shitty transit system, no Ubers allowed etc. but they do have a short term car rental service called Evo. She uses it all the time for shopping.“Dad, I don’t know what I’d be doing right now if you hadn’t pushed so hard to drive.”
That’s not what she said and you know it.
I think there’s a balance (ha!) to be had between letting your kids call all the shots and forcing them to do things. Neither extreme is good parenting, in my view. And I say that as a parent who has failed in both directions at various times. I doubt a parent exists who hasn’t at some time got into a foolish argument with their offspring where they end up having to assert they are right just because, or alternatively let them do what they want for an hour or two for the sake of peace and quiet even if they are supposed to be doing something else. But overall I aim for the middle ground of trying to persuade my kids to do the right thing. No need for “forcing”, most of the time.
No, she clearly didn’t say that, and I didn’t suggest she did. Please read what I wrote. I’m asking what she would do if her kids didn’t cooperate and go along with her “one activity” edict and said they wanted zero activities?
And I’m positing she wouldn’t be quite so happy to go along and let them be as inactive as they wanted. Would she “force” them to do activities or allow them to be sedentary?
Being active isn’t learned; it’s UNlearned. Little humans are innately curious and active. Ask any preschool teacher. You rarely have to cajole a toddler to go outside and play, even when it’s cold or hot outside. So the best advice I can give any parent is to let them continue to explore their world as they get older.
Start out with stroller rides when they’re infants. Bundle them up, if necessary, and walk them around the neighborhood and let them look around. As they get older, put away the stroller and let them walk with you. Don’t ask their opinion, just do it. You can expand from there:
- Take them boating, swimming, or snorkeling.
- Go on a picnic (or pick up food at their favorite restaurant), and make the destination someplace you have to hike to.
- Take them to a public park that has play equipment or water rides.
- Go to a stream and hop rocks.
- Search for fossils or shells.
- Take them geocaching.
- Walk the dog.
- Go rafting or canoeing.
- Pick strawberries, visit a pumpkin patch.
- Rake leaves, mow the lawn, build a snowman.
- Go ice skating.
- Go fishing.
- Go sled riding.
- Buy them Wiifit and have dance competitions.
- Take them to the zoo, a museum or an amusement park.
etc, etc.
PS - I still don’t believe in forcing them to do things that they don’t want to do. We have a lake house and have taken them boating since they were infants. One year, my youngest daughter (~8 yo) saw a snapping turtle. She didn’t get into the water for the rest of the summer. Shrug. She was back in the next summer.
When they were both in their late teens, we took them on a snorkeling trip. While they both tried it, the oldest wasn’t a fan and sat on the boat most of the time. Cool with me.
Like I said, expose them to many different things and hopefully they’ll keep it up and find things that they really enjoy when they get older. That’s really all you can do.
My dtr is due for our 2d grandkid any day. Older sis will be 5 in June. Til now she had those Strider bikes, they put pedals on the larger Strider, and she is great on it.
We thought big sis deserved a present when the new kid came along, so we just picked up a totally cool hot pink bike w/ big black knobby wheels and black hardware. Can’t wait to see her tearing around on that thing.
When she was born, we committed to being “The Bike Grandparents.” Both of us had crappy bikes as kids, and the parents don’t have tons of case. So we are gong to make sure the grandkids always have decent, correct-sized bikes.
I read what you wrote. Despite your claim, you didn’t write “what you you do if your kids didn’t cooperate and go along with your one activity edict?” Because you know what that statement would look like? It would look like this:
What you you do if your kids didn’t cooperate and go along with your one activity edict?
But what you actually wrote was:
Guin had it right. You should own your words.
My son is 15 and has never had an interest in learning. He told me if he was meant to roll he’d have been born with wheels. I’m sure it’s been said many times by other people too, but it was enough to satisfy me that I needed to stop asking. I always loved my bike and so did my daughter. I don’t know why he’s never liked it, but he does get nervous easy, and he’s always a bit wobbly just walking. Trips a lot, runs in to things. That sort of thing. I could tell the times I tried to teach him it was a big struggle. He did have to do OT for eye-hand and gross motor skills so maybe that’s part of it. One of his therapies was sitting and pushing a roller board and he never liked that either.
I loved biking as a kid, and continue to love biking. I still agree with most everyone who says “drop it.” No one needs to do everything.
However, I did want to say one thing-- does he generally avoid things that require balance? It is possible he has a poor sense of balance, or is slightly dyspraxic? My son is 13, and is still trying to master bike-riding, although in his case he very much wants to. I got a tandem bike to give him a sense of what it is like to ride a bike, and that seems to have helped a lot, because he is able to ride if he is push-started, but he can’t start himself yet.
He has a very mild case of dyspraxia. He was slightly speech-delayed-- not enough for free therapy, but we paid for it anyway, because he was clearly frustrated with himself. His handwriting is poor, and he’s not great at sports, but he’s mostly just sort of a klutz-- he’s not behind enough to be considered disabled. When he was three, he was two standard deviations below the norm on just a couple of tasks, so he got the diagnosis, bit honestly, he had a very brief hypoxic incident at birth, which put him at risk for things like dyspraxia. Otherwise, he might not have the diagnosis.
You son may be a gazelle otherwise, and I may be way off. But I’m just saying, that if this is genuinely something that is more difficult for him than for other people, why force it? If he wanted to learn, my answer would be different-- but either way, I’d let it go.
@Cairo & @Guin
No, problem - I OWN those words - and while I appreciate the deflection and distraction by focusing on semantics rather than content and intent (a technique my wife also has mastered:), my point is still: it’s all well and good to say “I didn’t force my kids to do any specific thing” but there was an explicit expectation they would do at least “one thing”. I’m asking
I’m not at all clear why so many people have an issue or embarrassment with this situation. My judgement as an adult is by and large far better than my kid’s. I have zero issue with saying that.
My daughter has thanked me time and time again for all the things we forced her to do: biking, skating, typing, driving, skiing, swimming, playing team sports and many more. In our judgements as parental adults, with a lot more life experiences, they were all important things to know so we absolutely pressured our kids. Zero embarrassment, it’s called being a good parent.
Couldn’t agree more. We did literally did every single thing on your list with our kids.
Like your example of swimming we never once forced our kids to do activities after they’d learned them. The learning was critical for us: Learn how to drive, how to cycle, how to swim.
We explicitly told them that if they never again hopped on a bike, got behind a steering wheel or jumped in the water, that was fine. The forcing was the learning only. We made a leap of faith that they would find inherent fun in being active and choose to do those things themselves in the future. We were right.