Lessons Learned in Balance Biking

Earlier this year, we bought our three year old son a balance bike.  That's a pedal-less bike, designed to teach children how to balance.  They scoot along on it, coast down hills, practice steering etc.  Training wheels or stabilizers as we call them in the UK tend not to work well, since the child gets into the habit of riding slightly tilted so that one wheel is going on the ground.  The balance bike teaches balance-skills first, and stamina for pedaling will be learned once the child graduates to a real bike.

Getting Started

I'm not going to spend a lot of time writing about the pros and cons of balance bikes.  There's plenty of stuff out there for that.  If you're intrigued, the Strider blog invariably has videos and pictures of children using them.  We have the Strider brand, but The Parent’s Guide to Balance Bikes, Complete Reviews & Comparisons of 16 Different Brands gives as thorough a discussion of what to look for when purchasing as you'll find anywhere.

What I am going to write about is our experience with my three year old son on his.  Obviously, my husband and I never had balance bikes when we were kids.  My only experience was seeing one of the children ride one to school, but we loved the concept.  Our son loved his tricycle and riding in the chariot (a bicycle trailer).  My husband is a cycling enthusiast who likes the sound of our son's name followed by "winner of the Tour de France!"

We bought the bike at the start of summer right before it was blisteringly hot and we only made a couple of half-hearted attempts to go out with it, because I am a wuss when it comes to heat.  In September, we tried again.  My son took a little while to get the idea of how to sit and scoot along, but he was game to persist with us.  It was when Daddy demonstrated on his mountain bike that he really caught the idea.

I took him to the same park with short paved trails that we'd used with his tricycle, but I soon realised that the advantage of the balance bike is that it's lighter and easier for the child to control (he can just plant his feet and hitch it over an obstacle for one thing).  So we started doing more ambitious walks with me pushing his sister on one of those long-handled tricycles.

This is, of course, the key.  Practice as much as possible.  But there are a few things to bear in mind:

1. Your child will go faster than you, particularly if you're pushing another child.  He's never going to get up to full cycling speed, but two months on, my husband has to run to keep up with him.
2. Your child can balance for longer than you think... especially when motivated.  An early shock for me was when he attempted a long incline.  I was sure he'd fall over before he reached the bottom, but instead he kept going--and accelerating.
3. For your child, the most logical way of stopping is to crash into something.  That hill from point 2?  He was terrified by his own speed, so he steered straight into a massive stone block.  And so I got my first (and preferably only) sight of my son flying over his handlebars.

So, and I cannot stress this enough, buy a helmet to go with the bike.  My son was completely unhurt by the crash I mentioned above, but I had been so close to not bothering with the helmet that day.  We've been religious about it ever since.  Also, getting them straight back on the bike is good for both of you.

The Skate Park

After the experience of a crash, I wanted to find somewhere suitable for him to practice on the bike, learn how to moderate his speed and deal with inclines at his own pace.  It never occurred to me to try the local skate park until I saw an online video of a family doing just that with their two year old.  I realised that that would be a great place.  The only problem was that I was even more unfamiliar with skate parks than with balance bikes (they didn't have those in our day either), and the concept of letting my barely-out-of-toddlerhood son loose in one was terrifying.

So we attempted to go at a quiet time of day, but there were still up to a dozen people on bikes, skateboards and scooters whizzing around.  My son and I (and twenty-one month old daughter) stopped at the entrance, hugely intimidated.  He declared he didn't want to go in, and rode up and down the entrance ramp a few times instead.  I privately agreed with him, but I was determined not to back down.

So I talked him through the gate and we self-consciously tried to find an out of the way corner in which to practice on a couple of small ramps.  There really aren't any out of the way corners in our skate park.  Not being a connoisseur, I have no idea how it compares to others, but I thought it was a fantastic piece of stunt architecture--and felt ever more out of place as I held my squirming daughter and encouraged my small son on his tiny bike.

Eventually, we did find a good spot where I could sit on a bench and my son could practice on one ramp over and over.  There was another one behind it, for a sequential effect, and after a few minutes, he tried going up to the top of that one.  Once at the top he shook his head and pushed his bike back down, but a few minutes later he was back to the top, and this time he rode down.  After ten minutes, he was pushing off from the top ramp, coasting down the second and holding his balance to go up the ramp opposite.  He was ecstatic.

The other great thing was that the other adults and children using the skate park (who were five to twenty years older than my son) were thoroughly considerate of us and if anything seemed tickled to see my son having a go at it.  My son, fortunately, was also pretty good about watching out for other users, though I prompted him to wait or stop on occasion.  

Despite my fears, having other skaters around was helpful.  Seeing how other people used the various ramps, whatever they were riding, was a good example for him.  And there were enough stunts going on for my daughter to sit quietly in sheer fascination.

We went back again today.  It was colder and quieter, and my son took off all over it, scooting around to try different coasting routes and shrieking an incongruous "Whee!" as he shot down the ramps.  The plan is to become hardcore skate park visitors, sticking it out through the winter while it's quieter and my son has the added padding of warm clothing.  He took a couple of falls today and was absolutely fine.
 
Come next spring, he might well be able to hold his own alongside the skater boys, but we expect to be buying him a proper bike and hitting the trails.   We will of course be handing the balance bike over to our daughter, who will be two by then.  God only knows, she's already itching to have a go!

Autumn Updates

So now that we're back on an even keel (and, thank god, we are), I should do a couple of updates on everything.

I have two big life improvement projects this autumn.  One is food, and that will require a post of its own sometime.  The other is to ditch the stroller (I know, I should say 'pushchair'; it's one of the Americanisms that we've adopted).  I am a firm believer in the rule of thumb that a child can walk a mile for every year of its age (although I'm a bit fuzzy on where you stop), and so, now that it's not too hot to carry my daughter if she does get tired, we are going on excursions sans buggy--with a very few exceptions for all day trips.

This also means I don't have a stroller to load up with paraphernalia, so I'm trying to cut down on what we take with us.  There goes the nappy bag, too!  I've reverted to my usual handbag, which in previous years was sized to hold my wallet, phone and a paperback book.  Now it holds my wallet, phone, nappy (or two) and a pack of wipes.  And that's it!

In practice, I quite often take the camera bag with me as well, so I am lugging that around, but for the most part it's bliss to just walk around the zoo, or the botanical gardens, or the playground without having to look for ramps or find a place to park the stroller.  I feel liberated!

It's a relief in many other ways.  One of the mistakes I made when my daughter first started walking was to let my three year old son get into the stroller when she wasn't in it.  Suddenly, riding in the stroller became a coveted position by both children and they started fighting over it.  With the stroller gone, they don't worry about it.

It's going to be an ongoing thing to build my daughter's stamina up, but I've been trying to get out alone with her twice a week for a little walk at her pace, and the cooler weather here has meant that we've been spending almost every afternoon outside too, and I'm already seeing improvement. 

If she asks to be picked up, I try and encourage her to keep walking, distracting her if I can... but I don't push the issue further than that.  If I end up carrying her, I'll usually try and set her down again after a few dozen yards, usually at a change of path (i.e. at the start of a boardwalk, or by an offshoot trail) or when something particularly attractive comes into view.  Generally, that works.

As I said, she's already doing better.  This afternoon, we went for a walk around the Botanical Gardens, and although she had to be carried for a little way on the path back, I was able to set her down to 'climb' a tree, and then she walked the rest of the way.  She was clearly tired, because she was going so slowly, but she held my hand tightly and never once asked to be picked up.  I'm thrilled.  I can't wait to be able to do proper rambles with the children, exploring woods without having to always be 'in carrying distance' of home / the car. 

Also, one of the things we figured out while we were in the UK this year is that walks are one of the best ways of tiring your children out without tiring yourself out.  I find that if I take them to the playground, I get worn out before they do, but with walking it's the other way around.

Meanwhile, way back at the start of the year, I tried to figure out how I wanted my son to learn to read and what my role was in that.  He's still plugging away at the moveable alphabet at school, 'writing' words by sounding them out but has not made the leap to reading by the same method.  I've followed a variety of different activities to support his literacy, but what is currently working for us is to just look at the front cover of whatever book we're about to read and talk about the sounds in the title. 

Since he knows all the basic sounds, i.e. his letters, I'll usually point out a few letter combinations to him.  Mostly 'oo', 'ee', 'th', and 'ar'.  Also because he has a strong vowel in his name and a 'y' ending, I've explained to him that those letters can make two sounds (I've been saying that 'y' at the end of a word is usually an 'ee' sound). 

I'm trying not to require anything of him with this exercise, it's just a time that works for us to talk about this kind of stuff.  We spend a few seconds on the title, or one word in the title, before reading the book.  (We also talk about who wrote the words and who drew the pictures, and where the book came from, because he likes to know).

The other thing he's been doing lately is running his finger along the line of text in books he's memorised, or virtually memorised.  It's only a handful of books he's doing that with, but when he forgets what the words say, I'm trying to get him to look at the first letter of the word to know what sound it starts with and jog his memory.  That's not producing notable success, but I figure that any reminder to look at the individual letters is a good thing.

He recently found Where the Wild Things Are at Barnes and Noble and was greatly excited since he'd had it read to him several times at school.  For almost a week, that was the only book he wanted to read!  But he started drawing his finger across the title and saying the words, so I got him to find the 'W's for 'where' and 'wild' and the 'th's for 'the' and 'things' and the 'ar' for 'are'.  I'm not entirely convinced that he is spotting the letters, but he now says the correct word for where his finger is, and gleefully shouts 'Arrrr!' at the end.

So while there are still daily ups and downs, and various other "Well, bugger, I failed at that," moments, the past week has felt very much like constructive progress.  Hooray!