Trike To Bike In Under 48 Hours

My eldest son has done things pretty quickly for the most part. He’s not composing symphonies, writing software from scratch or doing my taxes for me. He did, however, skip crawling to go straight to walking, recognize all his letters before setting foot in school and now picks up a book and reads quietly as often as he watches television.

While there are plenty of ways he’s developed quickly and independently, there was one thing he refused to attempt. He had absolutely no interest in learning how to ride his bicycle. Part of this may be because he has one of the most bad-ass three-wheel vehicles ever invented (the Razor Rip-Rider 360 tricycle, Transformer Generation Dad recommended, see Buy Your Kids…) or it may have been nerves. Either way, his friends and his younger brother’s friends were all cruising down the block on their bikes while his sat in the garage collecting dust.

A few weeks ago, my father stepped forward with an idea of how to painlessly teach my son how to ride his bicycle. The technique seemed crazy to me and was definitely not the method my father used to teach me how to ride. He taught me and my brothers the old fashioned way: he ran along with us and let go, watching us scrape our knees day after day for a week or two until we got sick of falling and decided to figure it out. In hindsight, I’m sure he wished this new way of learning how to ride had been shown to him. He deserves all the credit in the world for passing it on to me.

Step one was very counter-intuitive. Take the training wheels off.

But don’t stop there. Take the pedals off as well. Then, lower the seat as far as it will go. If your child can have their butt on the seat and their feet on the ground at the same time, the rest is easy. If they can’t, either get them a smaller bike, wait until they get taller, or put the pedals and training wheels back on and do it the old fashioned way, you dinosaur.

Once your child can keep the bike standing upright while being on the seat, have them hold it there awhile. Then, tell them to lift both feet slightly off the ground and try to keep the bike standing. No rolling, no falling, just lifting their feet an inch or two off the ground to see if they can keep it balanced for a few seconds before it tips to one side.

You’ll see them quickly be able to increase in ability. They will be keeping the bike upright longer and longer. The other thing that will happen quickly, as it did with my seven-year-old, is that they will get bored of doing this.

That’s fine. For once, you want them to get bored of what they’re doing. Tell them to go ahead and use their feet to push the bike around. Just keep them in sight while they do this. They will naturally incorporate the balancing lesson you just practiced with them and try to balance and glide along as they push their bike. If they start to fall, they will be able to just put their feet down and stand up.

The next step is to, again (and I can’t stress this enough) keep them in sight and away from streets or avenues of traffic and sit back and watch. My process involved having my son stop while I went inside and got myself a beer. Once I was back out, beer open, sitting on my front porch, he was able to resume.

Allow this to continue, if your child will allow, for several hours. The pushing the bike, not the beer drinking. If you chose to incorporate that into your method, the beer drinking should be limited to one or two cans/bottles.

If your child enjoys this and wants to continue all day, let them, provided you don't have a hot date to get ready for. Eventually, maybe the next day, they will beg you to put the pedals back on. This part will go faster than the first few steps and before you know it, you will be the proud parent of a child who can ride a “big-boy” (or “big girl”) bike.

Congratulations. You deserve a beer. Be sure to say thank you to my dad since I can’t find the original source he received the information from right now. He deserves a beer to. Buy him one.