This guy was not really trying to explain to hacker parents how they should teach their kids to ride a bike. As has has been adequately demonstrated in the comments they already know aaaaaaaall about that. His actual point, which seems to have whooshed past most people’s heads, is much more interesting: can you learn a thing more effectively by first simplifying that thing so radically that a seasoned user would find it useless? Also not exactly a totally new idea but, depending on context, just counterintuitive enough that you may miss it.
I would love to see this approach in language learning, which I am fairly bad at. I'm very much driven by results rather than accuracy, and so often a teacher will correct me on the finer points of the language I'm using and I'll either no idea what they are talking about, or know that I am certainly not going to remember that detail. In either case I find it very demoralising.
If there was a "Learn to speak German like a 5 year old" course then I would love that. Give me something usable to motivate me further, then I can come back for more complexity when I actually want and need it.
But isn't this the case for all language courses? They start you slow and build up? I feel like it isn't, although perhaps it is just the courses I have seen. It seems to me that the people who teach languages generally really like languages, so they understandably revel in the details. I, however, do not (although I wish I did).
I learned Spanish at a two year old level by focusing only on the top 24 verbs, in all (major) tenses first. So, ir, ser, estar, tener, haber, hacer, poner, poder, venir, ver, decir, dar, etc., in present, preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive, progressives, and perfects.
Then I learned about 2000 nouns from several lists. Then I learned some common "weird" constructions like darse cuenta, and hace falta.
Now I can read paperbacks on the plane without a dictionary, and follow the plot. I can communicate simply, and send pretty good texts. I have a lot of trouble with TV and radio, but it's progress. This took 2 years with mainly self study and Duolingo for accountability. I don't think an app alone would do the trick.
This is pretty much the methodology behind "comprehensible input", where you consume lots of content that you can just about understand and "let your brain figure it out".
There's quite a lot along these lines. LingQ helps you learn as you read books, and I built https://nuenki.app, which gives you constant comprehensible input as you browse the web.
I also really like Language Transfer, which isn't really a comprehensible input course, but tries to draw parallels to English and talks through the etymology a little. The approach appeals to me.
There are resources available for children, eg Muzzy is an animated immersion program for 5 year olds that (if you can bear the cheesy animation) might work. (In the US, available on Kanopy with a public library card.) And if you are good at searching you might also find resources that educators use for teaching recently immigrated children, although that implicitly requires a teacher/partner to be working with you.
Everyone learns languages in a different way. There are some people who like to be told what the basic rules of the language are and can use that to structure new sentences. Like giving someone K&R I suppose. Other people need to hear it. Personally, because I am only learning a language for practical purposes like travel, I'd love a course that dispensed with the grammar and taught contemporary phrases used in everyday life. For example, I am never going to ask and be told where the library is. But I'm very likely to hear, "cash or card?" or to ask "does this train go to Bologna?". So practicality for me wins early on, and then later I'd like to learn the top 500 words, and then the grammar structures.
I have a theory about language acquisition that I've never had the time to fully explore, that developing an ear for a language is the critical first step.
To that end, my theory would be that a program of imitation & mimicry would be the most effective way to learn. That you would hear a native speaker say a phrase and attempt to fluently imitate it. Specifically, record your voice as you speak and listen to what you say and try to as perfectly as possible imitate the prototype phrase.
Learn vocabulary and grammar later; focus, like children do, on hearing the language and imitating its use. Learn reading and writing last of all; formal grammar and especially spelling are the pedals on the bike.
Checkout Learncraft Spanish. The step they take to simplify that others do not is that they focus knly on grammer for a very lokg time, and just use english verbs and nouns.
For example, at a certain point the only words you will have learned are que and lo, so the quiz sentances will be like :
I want you to eat it -> I want que lo you eat
This prpgram has been extremely useful to me and helped me learn spanosh far quicker than other methods. They also use memory palace techniques and have an unusually effective way of organizing vocab learning
Author of the piece here, I speak three languages (Norwegian, English, and Spanish) and am currently working on a fourth (Japanese).
"Taking the pedals off the bike" advice for language learning:
- Learn pronunciation first
A lot of people never master a native (or semi-native) accent, but if you sit down and figure it out, it's easier than it seems at first. Getting the native pronunciation down matters because otherwise you literally can't distinguish between certain words, and it will be a habit you'll never unlearn. It makes everything else easier. It also gives you massive cred with native speakers who will overlook your atrocious grammar and paltry vocab because "wow, you sound good! I'm impressed." It's taken both as a sign of respect and that you're putting in the effort, and makes you punch above your actual weight. This does wonders for confidence and makes you less shy about trying to learn by speaking & listening, which is crucial.
Gabriel Wyner does a good job explaining it in his book "Fluent Forever" (his method is pretty cool too but I have some critiques of it overall, "learn pronunciation first" is the best single lesson to transfer to other language learning methodologies).
If you haven’t checked out the Pimsleur[0] app, you might find it useful for learning a language.
It’s the only language learning system that has ever worked for me. It focuses on speaking and every day language rather than reading, writing, and memorizing vocabulary, conjugations, etc.
It isn’t cheap, but it’s designed for you to learn enough to not need it anymore.
It probably doesn’t work for everyone, but it did feel like a different approach than many of the other language apps I tried in the past.
That sounds rather like the way the Pimsleur approach teaches. It drills fundamentals of grammar through fairly basic "travel vocabulary," but once you have that foundation you can go pretty far.
If you read reviews for kids foreign-language language books on Amazon, you'll see a fair amount of adults reading it for themselves mixed in. That's a little more self-directed but the vocab and sentence structure is organically restrained and the books are fun!
caveat: I've only read two books in this manner incidentally, but I knew some people who did this kind of thing on the side during our college language classes.
I would think such a course might ingrain bad habits. The case system sounds strange when used incorrectly, and it'd be much harder to re-learn it if the wrong version started to become familiar to you.
It's funny really. I assumed by the context of being posted here on HN that this wasn't literally about teaching children to ride a bike.
I'm reminded of the approach taken by the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP): start with this magical thing called Scheme and learn simple programming techniques and general principles like abstraction, then gradually add the "pedals" back until you've basically learnt to program in assembly and write a compiler for your high-level language.
I agree, but to be fair I think that point could have been made clearer in the post.
A similar but related lesson: the best way to teach something is to design a task that is just difficult enough that the learner can figure it out on their own.
When I was reading parenting books in preparation for my own kids, this is one consistent theme that kept coming up, sometimes called "scaffolding." The idea is that you provide a safe environment, design a task that is just the right level of difficulty, then let the child figure it out themselves. (For example, rather than directly holding a kid climbing up a ladder, let them climb it by themselves while you stand by to catch them just in case.) As a result, they develop more independence, self-confidence, and the lessons stick.
"Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life." -- Jean Piaget
Piaget is well known in teaching circles as a philosophical father of pedagogy. A (slightly) less know pedagogist is Vygotsky, who invented the term “Zone of Proximal Development”. The idea is that kids can learn from others and from experimentation if you can design activities where you take the skills they currently have, consider the skill you want them to acquire, and build steps between them that a child can succeed in. To develop this example: once a child can walk, they can learn to balance by being given a task which allows them to safely experiment with falling over and staying upright. Once they can balance, you can experiment with moving while balancing. Once they can move forward with balancing, they can learn stopping safely. Finally, they should be ready to learn how to pedal.
If you don’t allow them to complete all the previous steps, they may just keep failing at the next task, because they’re not yet in the “zone” to be able to acquire the next skill.
If a child can’t balance annd move forwards unaided, they won’t be able do the next thing (pedalling) even with help.
Children have different skills and capabilities and Vygotsky is not prescriptive about who needs to help, and the ZPD theory often encourages learning from peers rather than adults (parents/teachers).
Don’t Miss the Post for the Trees – Here’s Why Most People Do
You see it all the time. A post comes through your feed. It's insightful. It’s bold. It’s… mostly ignored.
Why?
Because people don’t actually engage with the core idea — they react to what they think it says.
The same thing happens in business:
- Founders get stuck in the weeds of their product without seeing the bigger market opportunity.
- Teams hyper-focus on the tech, missing the customer pain point.
- Investors hear the pitch, but miss the deeper vision driving it.
People miss the post for the trees.
Here’s the thing: breakthroughs happen when you push past surface-level reactions.
The best founders? They’re not just building products — they’re connecting dots others miss.
The best marketers? They’re not just optimizing campaigns — they’re shifting narratives.
The best investors? They’re not chasing trends — they’re seeing past the noise.
If you want to stand out in a noisy world, here’s the question to ask yourself:
Am I reacting to the surface? Or am I leaning in to understand what’s really being said?
The magic is always in the nuance. The signal is often buried in the noise. The big ideas?
They’re the ones that most people scroll past.
I've been told that it's easier to learn to ski without poles by an experienced instructor. Apparently his pupils would all spend their time trying to figure out these new "pole" things and very little time actually learning how to balance if he started there. I also think it's probably better to hike without trekking poles even on difficult terrain until you master balance. They're more for supporting your upper body if you have a 75+ liter pack full of gear than for keeping you from eating shit if you step on an unsupported rock.
I've taught several snowboarders how to ride and the teaching process is about putting them in a position where they forget about the distracting things.
Always start them on a blue (or blue-black) slope, because it forces them to learn to use the edge of the board. Lot of easy drills like side slipping and simply turning your head to control direction.
If you start a snow boarder on a green run, it always results in them catching an edge and eventually face planting. Not a fun experience.
that might be a good analogy because, generally speaking, skiing is much, much harder without poles (hence an expert would never do it (unless they are hitting an olympic vert ramp or something)), but it is exactly for this reason that the poles distract you from learning the "right" lesson-- people use their poles pretty much randomly at the start, and the poles help them... to do the wrong thing. but once you have the real crux of skiing down-- body position and balance + using your edges and weight shifts to turn-- poles are completely trivial to add.
Another take I've had is that we were wrong in the past. Pedaling isn't the tricky part of riding a bike. Balancing is. Training wheels let you learn to pedal.
Maybe that's part of the reason why "strider" bikes are becoming a lot more common for toddlers to learn how to ride a bike. They're effectively what the OP describes, a bike with no pedals that you run and then balance on.
That is an interesting video! Your writing made me expect the neural network had changed gravity as hacky part of its solution, but it's the creator trying to train a neural network to balance a simulated double pendulum and failed, and then wondered if he could train a simpler version in a simulation with no gravity and high friction to make it easy, then see if the solution can gradually be retrained to cope as he adjusts those to full gravity and normal friction. The visualisations in it are very good.
Made perfect sense when I read it, because this is also how to teach snowboarding. A reasonably proficient snowboarder will think 'it all about going back and forth from the front edge to the back edge smoothly' but a beginner needs to learn how to first stand in balance over the board without falling on the face or their back.
I’d like to say, “Is this not obvious?” but I’m not sure I fully appreciated what follows until I had a sufficient level of exposure to abstract mathematics. A core element of problem solving is reduction, be it to logically equivalent formulations or to more atomic components that can be reasoned about together.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is spot on. I live in the Netherlands, both my kids could ride a bike at 2. Shortly after learning how to walk, many kids here get a "loopfiets" (walking bike) which is exactly this, a bike with no pedals (nor a chain etc) [0]. I never saw a kid that can't ride this instantly.
Now, the funny thing is that most parents, when their kids are ready for a real bike, they put them on one with side-wheels (support wheels?) [1, 2]... My wife and I were looking at kids doing this and were thinking the same thing: "Wait, this is unlearning the whole thing they learned about balance and steering on 2 wheels! Let's go straight to no-support-wheels!" And voila, there they were, within a couple of attempts (we ran along) they were riding around! While many kids struggle when their support wheels come off.
Since then we joke that we are part of the anti-support-wheel-club when we see kids steering uncomfortably on such a bike. Which is really awkward since the bike has to stay upright, the kids have to hang to one side for balance when steering. And yet, it remains the most (or at least, a very) popular way.
> I never saw a kid that can't ride this instantly.
As a data point, we tried this with my son, who is physically very capable if not advanced, and despite many attempts over months, it never clicked for him. We eventually went the training wheels route, which he instantly adopted, and once he was comfortable on that for a while, he learned to ride without them in a single session.
We've since met other parents who had similar experiences, so I think it's definitely not a universal thing that balance bikes are better or even useful.
Same with my daughter. We tried with balance bike, but she didn't adopt it and didn't find it fun to try. We went to training wheels and she was immediately motivated. And at the same time, I've heard success stories with balance bikes from my friends.
This, in my opinion, proves that different people might need different things. And, in turn, many immensely able and skilled ones fail at standard route (e.g. successful writers fail at school).
It’s fairy obvious but I like to keep this poka-yoke’ish concept in mind: it’s not about the person, it’s about the process.
I would never go to support wheels after a walking bike (laufrad in german). They learn to use instantly, and pretty fast are stable and balancing. Next step is to add pedals, but NOT pedals+support wheels!
The difficult part is not balance but looking ahead. When you are first learning to use the pedals, you instinctively LOOK at them. That's what makes it difficult. I learned on a standard bike but did not pedal until somone encouraged me to try. I was going downhill fast and everything without using the pedals. :)
Yeah, this is the way. I don't know why the training wheels route is still so ingrained here. Probably also some kids start there, and not on a balance bike (wrong imo).
I learned riding the bike with support wheels. This was almost 50 years ago, but I remember that it sucked, because whenever a support wheel touched the ground it would pull you to that side. With my children we did the same as you, and they learned really fast. My younger son was a little bit of a hotshot on the walking bike, but that is an entirely different story.
I struggled learning how to ride a bike. Training wheels made it difficult for me so my dad took them off and I struggled more because I didn't understand speed = balance. I gave up and asked for a Razer scooter for Christmas instead. A few years later, I'm at a family event (without my scooter) and I'm watching my cousins ride around the culdesac on their bikes making it look super easy. I hopped on one of their bikes and just started pedalling, it was so easy. Ran back inside to show my parents and they were happy for me but incredibly confused how I just learned how to ride a bike without any real instruction. Maybe a Razer scooter helped me with balance and not being afraid to go fast, I can see how a scooter is similar to a walking bike.
training/support wheels address the wrong part of what's "hard" about riding a bike. They also encourage the kid to sit down and look at their feet, limit where you can ride, make pedaling harder, provide false security (if you've ever seen a kid tip), and steal all the fun from riding a bike. Bikes are awesome because your body inputs have such an impact on what happens; training wheels make a bike like driving a car.
When much older, after cycling thousands of km, I tried a bike with support wheels and it was absolutely terrifying! How is one suppose to take corners?
I took the pedals off for one of my kids (the others did the training wheels), and it worked quite well.
The only downside was that he figured out that if he got wobbly, he could stick his legs down and a bit out and it would help him stabilize by lowering the center of gravity. That seemed great at the time, but when the pedals were put back on, he would still use this trick when he got wobbly, which isn't a great instinct. Took a bit of time to train that out of him.
But in the end, it was faster than the training wheels, and it's cheaper than buying a specialized balance bike.
My kid did a bicycle with the support wheels for a little while just to get the mechanics for pedaling, then did a balance bike for a month or so. After that I put the pedals on with no support wheels and she was riding in no time. I do think the balance bike helps a lot.
My daughter started using a balance bike around 18 months. By the time she was 2.5, she zoomed around on it and had started asking about pedals. We got her a pedal bike two months before she turned 3, with the expectation that we might have to take the pedals off for a few more months. Instead, within a few days (maybe 2 total hours of practice?) she was riding confidently and totally by herself--at not quite 3 years old.
It's so different than the challenging, scary attempts to remove training wheels when my siblings and I were 5 or 6 years old. One of those things where I didn't realize the science and tradition on teaching kids to ride bikes could change so dramatically within two decades!
All three of my kids were riding full bikes around 3 years old, having used a balance bike for 12-18 months previous. I don’t think my kids are exceptional - balance bikes work wonders!
She doesn't have very athletic parents, so she regularly exceeds my expectations for her, but she's not a particular standout otherwise!
Probably the more relevant factor: we replaced one of cars with a cargo bike when she was 15 months old, so she does 1500+ miles a year "on" a bike, and a tiny fraction of that in a car (we live in a totally car-centric US city, so this is pretty out of the norm). Bikes are the fabric of her daily life so she is really, really motivated to spend time on a bike.
This is exactly how I teach people to drive stick, and they’ll learn within 30 minutes.
Put them on an empty road with a downward slope. The car will roll on its own, without them having to use the gas pedal. Then they can just practice switching into first without the risk of stalling.
After a few times integrate using the gas pedal.
> This is exactly how I teach people to drive stick, and they’ll learn within 30 minutes. Put them on an empty road with a downward slope. T
I do it exactly the other way: put them on an empty road with a slight uphill.
With the parking brake on, let them practice getting a feel for when the clutch "bites". When it does, put the parking brake down and the car remains stationary.
Do that a few times (10m, or less) and the learner develops an intuition all by themselves for how the clutch pedal works (there's some travel until it "bites", the expected type of progression of the pedal, etc).
Can't teach that when they learn to use it like a button (which is what happens when they learn to change with the car in motion).
I've had success with getting people to do a clutch-only start then stop several times over. Once they get a feel for the engagement zone and realize that they can speed up the process by applying gas somewhere around it then it's all (metaphorically) downhill from there.
This is how I taught myself how after having multiple people tell me things like "it's just a continuous motion you do with both legs", "you just let the other pedal out while you give it gas", etc. Driving a manual seems to be one of those things that few people seem to be good at teaching because they forget how frustrating it can be to learn.
Oh man yeah the advice about continuous motion is not right. A clutch is a torque control device, in the case of a car it’s more like a torque limiting device. The more you let the pedal out the more torque you allow the engine to apply to the wheels up until the point where the torque you allow exceeds the engine’s available torque at a given rpm and throttle position. So if you’re constantly letting the clutch out you’re ramping up the torque limit linearly but the engine speed and wheel speed don’t match and if the engine speed is low of course the engine can easily stall.
Instead what you want to do, what most people do subconsciously is let the clutch out partially until it is allowing the engine to apply some of its available torque but not all, and then pause there until the car’s speed roughly matches the engine speed, at which point the clutch will stop slipping even though you still have the pedal partially depressed, after which you should be able to rapidly raise your foot from the clutch and feel no acceleration or deceleration. For an experienced driver that pause is less than like half a second from standstill. Also technically the point at which you want to pause the clutch let out depends on a whole bunch of things like how quickly you want to pull off, how much torque the engine can provide and whether you’re on a hill etc, but we just do this intuitively with experience.
This is like a super over-complicated way to think about it and I would never try to teach a learner driver by first explaining this lol but the point is, you find the engagement point and hold there for a while and then release when the car is moving. This is what we all do but it helps to understand why we do it so we don’t explain things wrong.
I feel like people also don’t get what applying more throttle does while the clutch is slipping. All it does is raise the engine rpm, it will apply absolutely no more torque (and therefore acceleration) no matter how much you press down the throttle. While the clutch is slipping the clutch pedal controls your torque and therefore acceleration. You need some throttle though to give you some room for error and some minimum torque to work with.
Interesting… I learned exactly the opposite way and I’d argue it was easier. Feet on clutch and brake. Start the engine. Get used to the feeling. Gear stick into first. Back to neutral. Give it a wiggle, that’s how you know you’re in neutral. Practice changing from neutral to first and back. Foot off the brake, practice holding the engine at 1k, 1.5k, 2k rpm.
Talk through the next bit first: Hold engine at 1.5k rpm. Ease off clutch just enough to start engaging and rolling forwards. Back on the clutch then gently break to a stop. Repeat until confident.
Etc. etc. The whole time the learner is in control of the car and they learn the basics without having to worry about steering.
I think this is basically the same thing, just with the other steps included. On the right surface in first gear you don't need the brake, so just controlling the clutch is enough to move the car
I couldn't figure it out even with this. Then my friend explained how a clutch worked and I started it on the first try. And I had been driving a tractor for years. But a tractor is a different torquey beast.
Someone recently told me that petrol and diesel engines with manual transmission feel very different. He told me that driving his dad's manual transmission diesel engine was easier because the clutch was "more forgiving". I cannot driving manual, so I have no idea about it. My guess: That tractor is diesel.
When I taught my sister how to drive a standard, the one sentence description that I gave her (that she still remembers today) was "before you do anything, push in the clutch".
This is exactly what it reminded me of. My dad taught me by setting me up on a flat surface (parking lot) and getting me to try and find the sweet spot where I could press on the gas a little. As in "let off the clutch a bit and press on the gas" with a bunch of ambiguity in the middle; how much should I do of either, why? When I was teaching my gf, I quickly realized this made no sense at all, and did exactly as you described. It didn't completely alleviate the stress, and I feel a bit bad that I put her through it, but just feathering the clutch is a massively better way to get a feel for it.
I taught my son to ride using training wheels. He rode around for a few days and asked me to take them off. So, I took them off. And when I came back outside from putting the tools and training wheels away, he was riding his bike as if he'd never not ridden it. I do like the author's idea however.
By the way, did you know that the the right pedal is right hand thread, but the left pedal is left handed thread? If it wasn't, the left pedal, being right hand threaded, would come loose easily. And that was a Wright Brothers innovation.
Love this soundbite. I did not know this and will totally use it to sound smart at dinner parties.
On a somewhat related note, the reason why Peugeot cars have a "0" in their model numbers (e.g. 208, 308, 408, etc.) goes back to the days before electric ignition, and when you still needed a crank to start the engine. The model number was in the middle of the grill, and the crank would go into the "0".
The problem with training wheels is that they train how to ride a quad, not a bike. On a quad, when you turn the handlebar to the left, you go to the left. On a bike, you fall to the right.
I vaguely remember my training wheels were set a bit higher and not touching the ground unless I was leaning a lot.
So this setup would aid training to ride properly.
On the other hand, I can find cranks which had reversed threads, pre-dating 1900, like US643349A filed 1895 where "The screw-threads on the parts b b' of the shaft are oppositely directed, or, in other words, are right and left hand threads".
It's described as protecting the ball-bearings, not to prevent coming loose.
> In 1900, the Wrights announced a "bicycle pedal that can't come unscrewed." Pedals were mounted to the crank by threaded spindles. On early bicycles, both crank arms had standard right-hand threads. As the cyclist pedaled, the action tended to tighten one pedal and loosen the other, with the result that one pedal kept dropping off the bike. British inventor William Kemp Starley had solved a similar problem years before when the right-hand cups that housed the crank or "bottom" bearing on early bicycles kept coming loose. He simply reversed the thread direction on the right cup so the pedaling action kept it tight. It wasn't long before bicycle makers realized the same solution could keep the pedals in place. Wilbur and Orville were in the vanguard of those manufacturers that offered right-hand threads on one crank arm and left-hand threads on the other.
That is, the Wright Brothers were early promoters of the design, but not the innovators.
You may be right. I read this on the late Sheldon Brown's website, and it stuck. References:
https://www.sheldonbrown.com/tancrank.html
Left-threaded pedals and cranks are reputedly an invention of the Wright brothers, bicycle builders from Dayton, Ohio. (They also built airplanes).
https://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/left.html
The left-threaded left pedal was not the result of armchair theorizing, it was a solution to a real problem: people's left pedals kept unscrewing! We have read that the left threading was invented by the Wright brothers, but we are not sure of this.
So, I said it with more authority than was warranted. But it's good enough for normal dinner conversation references ;)
I suspect a lot depends on the age and motor development level that people here are not talking about, and that there should a certain age where a kid has not developed the muscles as much as to bike fast enough to pedal comfortably and fast enough to be able to balance, and an age after where, once one has figured how to pedal comfortably, balancing would not be that hard. I would assume that it would be harder to balance in the first place if you have to struggle putting force to pedal, which also probably means you cannot develop a sufficient speed either.
The training wheels on the bike I learned on didn't have an additional brace to stop them from bending. (they were basically an L shape, only supported at the top)
I assume that was helpful for me, as they gave less and less support as they deformed over time and I had to properly balance to stay upright. I was still quite surprised with myself after they were taken off.
It's actually to stop it being screwed in so tightly you can't remove it. The threads are such that in normal usage the pedals turn the same way you'd unscrew them.
It's like the author has never heard of balance bikes, but they're very common, and have been for over a decade. FWIW, I taught my kid to ride when he was 3 by putting him at the top of a wheelchair ramp and letting him go. Took him 5 seconds, and he was riding around the park by himself by the second attempt. He'd never been on a bike before.
>It's like the author has never heard of balance bikes, but they're very common, and have been for over a decade.
Every time a post like this comes up a bunch people haven't heard of them. I'm sure it helps, especially with really little kids, but honestly kids learn to ride bikes pretty easy once they decide they want to really learn regardless of pedals or not.
I think it must be regional. They're universal in the UK now so there's no way you could have a kid and not know about them. Nobody had them when I was young though. Presumably they just haven't quite infiltrated America yet.
The use case is very little kids. They can use a balance bike about the same time they can toddle about the house (but before they can walk longer distances without support or tumbles).
This. Here (NL) where pretty much everyone can bike and a substantial portion of the population goes to work/groceries/etc. by bike, most kinds start with what we call a 'walking bike' (pretty much the same as a balance bike). Most kids are already pretty fast on them before switching to a bike with pedals.
It's also often recommended not to use training wheels. Just go balance bike -> pedal pike.
Strider bikes. And yes, they are amazing. Ours was 2.5 and she insisted she was ready for a big kid bike. Was peddling that afternoon although couldn’t start alone yet.
Balancing is the easy part. Progressing from stand still, to pedalling, while maintaining balance proved much harder (for my child). However, once mastered, the transition to confident rider was fast, I'm sure mostly thanks to having started on a balance bike early, and never having an interest in those scooters that every other kid seems to love (seemingly at the expense of learning to ride a proper bike)
> I did so in the usual manner - have her sit on the seat while I grab the handlebars and run along side her, then release the bike and watch her panic, freeze, topple over, and kick the bike in frustration.
This part confuses me a lot. Where I'm from you teach kids to ride by attaching a broom (or similar) stick to the back of the bike. That way you can gently hold them when they mess up the balance, but they still get the appropriate feedback that they need to balance on their own. As a plus you feel when they are getting better at it, and the "release" is softer. It is not an all or nothing process, you just hold the stick less and less, and suddenly the kid is cycling on their own.
I couldn't imagine doing the same with holding the handlebar. It would be hard to do. Would mess their feedback loop up. And what is worse it would telegraph to them when you are releasing them thus making it more likely that they panic.
Does anyone really do the "grabbing the handlebars" method to teach kids to ride a bike? Is it a regional difference?
You can also use a scarf that goes under their arms and run along with them ready to catch them with the scarf when they are going to fall. This way you apply 0 force and they get all the feedback. It did help that they stared on a balance bike with no pedals before making the transition to the bike with pedals.
Yes, a horrible idea. It's like throwing a kid in deep water and expecting them to swim. Border line child abuse.
I didn't even bother with a broomstick for my kids. I just ran along, holding the cargo rack. It didn't take them long to learn. A few hours spread out?
> I didn't even bother with a broomstick for my kids. I just ran along, holding the cargo rack.
Yeah. The story in my family is that my dad decided to teach me how to ride. We drove to a park to do it because our road was too busy. He got the bike out of the car first, and went back to get the broomstick. By the time he was back I was already cycling away from him. Undoubtedly due to all my experience with balance bikes. :)
But possibly to this day I couldn't ride if someone would grab my handlebars and push me for a bit then release them at some point. :D
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If there was a "Learn to speak German like a 5 year old" course then I would love that. Give me something usable to motivate me further, then I can come back for more complexity when I actually want and need it.
But isn't this the case for all language courses? They start you slow and build up? I feel like it isn't, although perhaps it is just the courses I have seen. It seems to me that the people who teach languages generally really like languages, so they understandably revel in the details. I, however, do not (although I wish I did).
I realise now this is a bit of a rant. Apologies!
Then I learned about 2000 nouns from several lists. Then I learned some common "weird" constructions like darse cuenta, and hace falta.
Now I can read paperbacks on the plane without a dictionary, and follow the plot. I can communicate simply, and send pretty good texts. I have a lot of trouble with TV and radio, but it's progress. This took 2 years with mainly self study and Duolingo for accountability. I don't think an app alone would do the trick.
This is pretty much the methodology behind "comprehensible input", where you consume lots of content that you can just about understand and "let your brain figure it out".
There's quite a lot along these lines. LingQ helps you learn as you read books, and I built https://nuenki.app, which gives you constant comprehensible input as you browse the web.
I also really like Language Transfer, which isn't really a comprehensible input course, but tries to draw parallels to English and talks through the etymology a little. The approach appeals to me.
Everyone learns languages in a different way. There are some people who like to be told what the basic rules of the language are and can use that to structure new sentences. Like giving someone K&R I suppose. Other people need to hear it. Personally, because I am only learning a language for practical purposes like travel, I'd love a course that dispensed with the grammar and taught contemporary phrases used in everyday life. For example, I am never going to ask and be told where the library is. But I'm very likely to hear, "cash or card?" or to ask "does this train go to Bologna?". So practicality for me wins early on, and then later I'd like to learn the top 500 words, and then the grammar structures.
To that end, my theory would be that a program of imitation & mimicry would be the most effective way to learn. That you would hear a native speaker say a phrase and attempt to fluently imitate it. Specifically, record your voice as you speak and listen to what you say and try to as perfectly as possible imitate the prototype phrase.
Learn vocabulary and grammar later; focus, like children do, on hearing the language and imitating its use. Learn reading and writing last of all; formal grammar and especially spelling are the pedals on the bike.
For example, at a certain point the only words you will have learned are que and lo, so the quiz sentances will be like :
I want you to eat it -> I want que lo you eat
This prpgram has been extremely useful to me and helped me learn spanosh far quicker than other methods. They also use memory palace techniques and have an unusually effective way of organizing vocab learning
"Taking the pedals off the bike" advice for language learning:
- Learn pronunciation first
A lot of people never master a native (or semi-native) accent, but if you sit down and figure it out, it's easier than it seems at first. Getting the native pronunciation down matters because otherwise you literally can't distinguish between certain words, and it will be a habit you'll never unlearn. It makes everything else easier. It also gives you massive cred with native speakers who will overlook your atrocious grammar and paltry vocab because "wow, you sound good! I'm impressed." It's taken both as a sign of respect and that you're putting in the effort, and makes you punch above your actual weight. This does wonders for confidence and makes you less shy about trying to learn by speaking & listening, which is crucial.
Gabriel Wyner does a good job explaining it in his book "Fluent Forever" (his method is pretty cool too but I have some critiques of it overall, "learn pronunciation first" is the best single lesson to transfer to other language learning methodologies).
It’s the only language learning system that has ever worked for me. It focuses on speaking and every day language rather than reading, writing, and memorizing vocabulary, conjugations, etc.
It isn’t cheap, but it’s designed for you to learn enough to not need it anymore.
It probably doesn’t work for everyone, but it did feel like a different approach than many of the other language apps I tried in the past.
[0]: https://www.pimsleur.com/
I'm reminded of the approach taken by the book Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP): start with this magical thing called Scheme and learn simple programming techniques and general principles like abstraction, then gradually add the "pedals" back until you've basically learnt to program in assembly and write a compiler for your high-level language.
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A similar but related lesson: the best way to teach something is to design a task that is just difficult enough that the learner can figure it out on their own.
When I was reading parenting books in preparation for my own kids, this is one consistent theme that kept coming up, sometimes called "scaffolding." The idea is that you provide a safe environment, design a task that is just the right level of difficulty, then let the child figure it out themselves. (For example, rather than directly holding a kid climbing up a ladder, let them climb it by themselves while you stand by to catch them just in case.) As a result, they develop more independence, self-confidence, and the lessons stick.
"Every time we teach a child something, we keep him from inventing it himself. On the other hand that which we allow him to discover by himself will remain with him visibly for the rest of his life." -- Jean Piaget
If you don’t allow them to complete all the previous steps, they may just keep failing at the next task, because they’re not yet in the “zone” to be able to acquire the next skill.
If a child can’t balance annd move forwards unaided, they won’t be able do the next thing (pedalling) even with help.
Children have different skills and capabilities and Vygotsky is not prescriptive about who needs to help, and the ZPD theory often encourages learning from peers rather than adults (parents/teachers).
You see it all the time. A post comes through your feed. It's insightful. It’s bold. It’s… mostly ignored.
Why? Because people don’t actually engage with the core idea — they react to what they think it says.
The same thing happens in business: - Founders get stuck in the weeds of their product without seeing the bigger market opportunity. - Teams hyper-focus on the tech, missing the customer pain point. - Investors hear the pitch, but miss the deeper vision driving it.
People miss the post for the trees.
Here’s the thing: breakthroughs happen when you push past surface-level reactions. The best founders? They’re not just building products — they’re connecting dots others miss. The best marketers? They’re not just optimizing campaigns — they’re shifting narratives. The best investors? They’re not chasing trends — they’re seeing past the noise.
If you want to stand out in a noisy world, here’s the question to ask yourself: Am I reacting to the surface? Or am I leaning in to understand what’s really being said?
The magic is always in the nuance. The signal is often buried in the noise. The big ideas? They’re the ones that most people scroll past.
So… don’t.
(I'm sorry I had to)
Always start them on a blue (or blue-black) slope, because it forces them to learn to use the edge of the board. Lot of easy drills like side slipping and simply turning your head to control direction.
If you start a snow boarder on a green run, it always results in them catching an edge and eventually face planting. Not a fun experience.
great analogy!
Likewise, music. The most popular method -- Suzuki -- starts kids out without sheet music. Reading comes later.
In both cases, it's also just less gear to manage. The benefit becomes obvious in group lessons and recitals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dandy_horse
Also, is it shocking to anyone that pedal+chain bicycles were invented in 1885, less than 20 years before powered flight?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle
It changes gravity! This is sort of like managing a double pendulum under water^ and then trying it in the air
The video: https://youtu.be/9gQQAO4I1Ck?si=Hs_3GxrZgmhr2xSn
^ haha not sure this would be easier
Dead Comment
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.
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-72928...
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.
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 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.
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.)
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.
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.
"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?
Same thing though. I was ruding the bike like a boss pretty quickly.
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.
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.
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.
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A toy? The balance bike was our kid's secondary mode of transportation for 2.5 years, after our bike trailer.
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.
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.
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.
I remember coming across Isla while researching online for my kid's second bike, but sheee! were they expensive.
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.
in practice, this winds up applying to 14" wheel bikes and maybe some 16" wheel bikes.
definitely a silly rule though.
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.
Now, the funny thing is that most parents, when their kids are ready for a real bike, they put them on one with side-wheels (support wheels?) [1, 2]... My wife and I were looking at kids doing this and were thinking the same thing: "Wait, this is unlearning the whole thing they learned about balance and steering on 2 wheels! Let's go straight to no-support-wheels!" And voila, there they were, within a couple of attempts (we ran along) they were riding around! While many kids struggle when their support wheels come off.
Since then we joke that we are part of the anti-support-wheel-club when we see kids steering uncomfortably on such a bike. Which is really awkward since the bike has to stay upright, the kids have to hang to one side for balance when steering. And yet, it remains the most (or at least, a very) popular way.
[0] https://www.babyhomepage.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Loopf...
[1] https://media.s-bol.com/qQv4Y69p8j33/1155x1200.jpg
[2] https://bike.nl/loekie-booster-kinderfiets-12-inch-jongens-g...
As a data point, we tried this with my son, who is physically very capable if not advanced, and despite many attempts over months, it never clicked for him. We eventually went the training wheels route, which he instantly adopted, and once he was comfortable on that for a while, he learned to ride without them in a single session.
We've since met other parents who had similar experiences, so I think it's definitely not a universal thing that balance bikes are better or even useful.
Kids are different, try out different things.
It’s fairy obvious but I like to keep this poka-yoke’ish concept in mind: it’s not about the person, it’s about the process.
In the US they are called "training wheels."
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The only downside was that he figured out that if he got wobbly, he could stick his legs down and a bit out and it would help him stabilize by lowering the center of gravity. That seemed great at the time, but when the pedals were put back on, he would still use this trick when he got wobbly, which isn't a great instinct. Took a bit of time to train that out of him.
But in the end, it was faster than the training wheels, and it's cheaper than buying a specialized balance bike.
It's so different than the challenging, scary attempts to remove training wheels when my siblings and I were 5 or 6 years old. One of those things where I didn't realize the science and tradition on teaching kids to ride bikes could change so dramatically within two decades!
Probably the more relevant factor: we replaced one of cars with a cargo bike when she was 15 months old, so she does 1500+ miles a year "on" a bike, and a tiny fraction of that in a car (we live in a totally car-centric US city, so this is pretty out of the norm). Bikes are the fabric of her daily life so she is really, really motivated to spend time on a bike.
I do it exactly the other way: put them on an empty road with a slight uphill.
With the parking brake on, let them practice getting a feel for when the clutch "bites". When it does, put the parking brake down and the car remains stationary.
Do that a few times (10m, or less) and the learner develops an intuition all by themselves for how the clutch pedal works (there's some travel until it "bites", the expected type of progression of the pedal, etc).
Can't teach that when they learn to use it like a button (which is what happens when they learn to change with the car in motion).
This is how I taught myself how after having multiple people tell me things like "it's just a continuous motion you do with both legs", "you just let the other pedal out while you give it gas", etc. Driving a manual seems to be one of those things that few people seem to be good at teaching because they forget how frustrating it can be to learn.
Instead what you want to do, what most people do subconsciously is let the clutch out partially until it is allowing the engine to apply some of its available torque but not all, and then pause there until the car’s speed roughly matches the engine speed, at which point the clutch will stop slipping even though you still have the pedal partially depressed, after which you should be able to rapidly raise your foot from the clutch and feel no acceleration or deceleration. For an experienced driver that pause is less than like half a second from standstill. Also technically the point at which you want to pause the clutch let out depends on a whole bunch of things like how quickly you want to pull off, how much torque the engine can provide and whether you’re on a hill etc, but we just do this intuitively with experience.
This is like a super over-complicated way to think about it and I would never try to teach a learner driver by first explaining this lol but the point is, you find the engagement point and hold there for a while and then release when the car is moving. This is what we all do but it helps to understand why we do it so we don’t explain things wrong.
I feel like people also don’t get what applying more throttle does while the clutch is slipping. All it does is raise the engine rpm, it will apply absolutely no more torque (and therefore acceleration) no matter how much you press down the throttle. While the clutch is slipping the clutch pedal controls your torque and therefore acceleration. You need some throttle though to give you some room for error and some minimum torque to work with.
Talk through the next bit first: Hold engine at 1.5k rpm. Ease off clutch just enough to start engaging and rolling forwards. Back on the clutch then gently break to a stop. Repeat until confident.
Etc. etc. The whole time the learner is in control of the car and they learn the basics without having to worry about steering.
By the way, did you know that the the right pedal is right hand thread, but the left pedal is left handed thread? If it wasn't, the left pedal, being right hand threaded, would come loose easily. And that was a Wright Brothers innovation.
On a somewhat related note, the reason why Peugeot cars have a "0" in their model numbers (e.g. 208, 308, 408, etc.) goes back to the days before electric ignition, and when you still needed a crank to start the engine. The model number was in the middle of the grill, and the crank would go into the "0".
I can find claims that it was so, but nothing substantial. For example, this 1959 kids book - https://archive.org/details/wilburorvillewri0000augu/page/17... .
On the other hand, I can find cranks which had reversed threads, pre-dating 1900, like US643349A filed 1895 where "The screw-threads on the parts b b' of the shaft are oppositely directed, or, in other words, are right and left hand threads".
It's described as protecting the ball-bearings, not to prevent coming loose.
https://www.wright-brothers.org/Information_Desk/Just_the_Fa... says:
> In 1900, the Wrights announced a "bicycle pedal that can't come unscrewed." Pedals were mounted to the crank by threaded spindles. On early bicycles, both crank arms had standard right-hand threads. As the cyclist pedaled, the action tended to tighten one pedal and loosen the other, with the result that one pedal kept dropping off the bike. British inventor William Kemp Starley had solved a similar problem years before when the right-hand cups that housed the crank or "bottom" bearing on early bicycles kept coming loose. He simply reversed the thread direction on the right cup so the pedaling action kept it tight. It wasn't long before bicycle makers realized the same solution could keep the pedals in place. Wilbur and Orville were in the vanguard of those manufacturers that offered right-hand threads on one crank arm and left-hand threads on the other.
That is, the Wright Brothers were early promoters of the design, but not the innovators.
I assume that was helpful for me, as they gave less and less support as they deformed over time and I had to properly balance to stay upright. I was still quite surprised with myself after they were taken off.
Every time a post like this comes up a bunch people haven't heard of them. I'm sure it helps, especially with really little kids, but honestly kids learn to ride bikes pretty easy once they decide they want to really learn regardless of pedals or not.
It's also often recommended not to use training wheels. Just go balance bike -> pedal pike.
Training wheels should be mocked off the market.
This part confuses me a lot. Where I'm from you teach kids to ride by attaching a broom (or similar) stick to the back of the bike. That way you can gently hold them when they mess up the balance, but they still get the appropriate feedback that they need to balance on their own. As a plus you feel when they are getting better at it, and the "release" is softer. It is not an all or nothing process, you just hold the stick less and less, and suddenly the kid is cycling on their own.
I couldn't imagine doing the same with holding the handlebar. It would be hard to do. Would mess their feedback loop up. And what is worse it would telegraph to them when you are releasing them thus making it more likely that they panic.
Does anyone really do the "grabbing the handlebars" method to teach kids to ride a bike? Is it a regional difference?
I didn't even bother with a broomstick for my kids. I just ran along, holding the cargo rack. It didn't take them long to learn. A few hours spread out?
Yeah. The story in my family is that my dad decided to teach me how to ride. We drove to a park to do it because our road was too busy. He got the bike out of the car first, and went back to get the broomstick. By the time he was back I was already cycling away from him. Undoubtedly due to all my experience with balance bikes. :)
But possibly to this day I couldn't ride if someone would grab my handlebars and push me for a bit then release them at some point. :D