What's the Right First Bike for Your Child?
Choosing the first bike for a child can often be a daunting task for a parent. There are many options available and most parents’ first impulse is to rush out to a department store and purchase a bike that fits their child’s personality.
This can often mean a pretty pink princess bike for a girl or a facsimile of a dirt bike for a boy. Unfortunately, a bike isn’t a decoration. A first bike is an important piece of equipment that should be constructed to aid in teaching a child to balance and ride as quickly and easily as possible.
Bicycle or Tricycle?
Most moms and dads are tempted to make their child’s first wheeled vehicle something with three or four wheels. It seems like a safe option so most parents will purchase a tricycle or ride-on toy for their toddler. Unfortunately, those vehicles do nothing to improve a child’s ability to balance. They’re toys. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. They just won’t teach a child to balance. Tricycles, with their tendency to tip over, can even be unsafe.
Some parents choose a bike with training wheels as a first bike. That’s trouble for sure. A standard 12” bike with training wheels generally weighs over 20 lbs. It’s just too much weight for most toddlers and preschoolers. They struggle to maneuver the bicycle and don’t have the motor skills to combine balance, pedaling and steering competently.
This approach will generally end one of two ways: either the child becomes dependent on the training wheels slowing their progress or they tip over because the bike is to tall and heavy and become afraid to ride.
What’s the Alternative?
Increasingly, parents are teaching their kids to ride on bikes without pedals called balance bikes. These first bikes for kids are made to teach kids as young as two how to balance on two wheels. It works incredibly well and is the most natural way for children to learn how to ride a two-wheeler.
There are several differences between a bike with training wheels you might find in a retail store and a balance bike.
The most obvious when compared side-by-side is the absence of pedals, chains or sprockets. The balance bike is propelled by the child’s feet (think Fred Flintstone). This keeps them close to the ground and in control.
There’s also a big difference in weight between an old school bike and a balance bike. While the smallest traditional pedal bike weighs in at 20 lbs, most balance bikes weigh less than ten pounds making them easy to control.
Balance bikes have seats that sit very low to the ground, making it easy for kids as young as eighteen months to straddle the seat and still have their feet flat on the ground.
The Benefits of a Balance Bike
The biggest difference between training wheels and a balance bike is philosophy. Many parents see learning to ride a bike as a rite of passage. It certainly is, but it doesn’t have to be a painful, frustrating rite of passage. Kids who learn on a balance bike, learn by exploration.
They won’t be relying on a parent to hold their bike up for them. They won’t be living in fear of crashing. They won’t be enduring a learning process that for some kids can take months or even years to master.
A toddler given the opportunity to learn on a balance bike is very likely to be balancing the bike after just a few rides. They’ll enjoy the freedom and pure joy of riding a bike at a very young age and make a simple and fast transition to a pedal bike once they’re big enough to handle its weight.
So which first bike is best? Hands-down, it’s the balance bike. There is simply no better way to teach a child to ride a bicycle. |
