How To Teach Your Child To Ride A Bike – Part 1

Can you remember back to when you were learning to ride your first bike?

For some, these memories may not be so happy or special and for others, these memories may take you back to a wonderful time of rich, pleasant feelings and emotions as you moved along freely with the wind in your face and your pet dog running beside you, tongue hanging out as they tried to keep-up with you.

Learning to ride a bike is a momentous occasion to celebrate with your child. They are not just learning a new skill but are beginning to experience a greater sense of freedom and independence.

Essentially, they are taking on a new and exciting challenge that has the potential to enrich their lives for years to come.

A balance and pedal bike are quite simply what we like to refer to here at ilovetoridemybike.com as a developmental powerhouse!

It supports a child’s physical, emotional, social and cognitive development exponentially. Therefore, having the right experiences at such a crucial stage of their development is essential.

But how exactly do you teach your child to ride a bike? Great question. Luckily, we are here to help. We have made it our goal, to present parents with a two-part series that addresses that very question.

We have broken our series, How to Teach Your Child to Ride a Bike into two-parts.

• Part 1 – Teaching Your Child to Ride a Balance Bike, and
• Part 2 – Teaching Your Child to Ride a Pedal Bike.

In this article, Part 1 – Teaching Your Child to Ride a Balance Bike, we will be covering the following elements.

• Learning the Skill of Balance for Riding – But why?
• Right Size + Right Fit Balance Bike
• Learning in the Right Environment
• Learning to Walk, Run and Glide
• Learning to Slow Down and Stop
• Parent Patience and Encouragement – The Fun Factor, and
• Conclusion

We now invite you to get comfortable, kick-back with your favorite form of hydration and enjoy our post that begins our journey into helping parents teach their child to ride a bike.

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Part 1 – Teaching Your Child to Ride a Balance Bike

Teaching and learning to ride a bike should be fun and relatively stress free (I did say relatively 🙂).

But there are some key steps in the learning and teaching process that can help make the above statement absolutely true for parents and their little riders.

So, let’s take a look at a simple, tried and true method that will guide both you as parents and your child as you journey into the bike riding world together!

Learning The Skill of Balance For Riding – But Why?

Balance First – A Better Learning Method

Learning to ride a bike used to be, for some at least, learning on a tricycle or at least a bike with training wheels before taking on the challenge of a pedal bike.

Luckily, times have changed, and a better tool (or toy) has been developed for kids to learn how to ride a bike, the right way.

This better method has at its foundation the skill of balance!

A balance bike (USA and AUS example) or a bike with pedals removed will do the trick just fine, enables the child to develop balance first, which then makes for a wonderfully smooth transition to a pedal bike when they are ready.

A child can easily and quickly learn how to put some power-to-the-pedal, but learning how to balance while gliding on two-wheels requires a little time, patience, encouragement and skill.

As they are learning to balance, another recommendation is for parents not to get into the habit of holding onto the seat and running alongside your little rider.

Simply let them begin slowly. They will naturally and intuitively begin to walk on their balance bike and move at their own pace. This speed will reflect their confidence, skill, age and temperament. We can simply let the balance bike do the teaching with our encouragement.

Right Size + Right Fit Balance Bike

Now that you have some insight into why it’s essential to learn balance first when teaching your child to ride a bike, next up, we need to ensure they are on the right bike and, more importantly, that this is fitted correctly to your riding champion.

So, how do we ensure we have the right bike and the right fit for your child?

To answer this question, we recommend that you head on over to our post, Balance Bike Buyers Guide, as this will cover all the information that you will need to answer the above question and more.

Within the above mentioned post, we provide the following information for our readers.

• What exactly is a balance bike, what determines balance bike sizes and why is this important?
• How to find your child’s inseam and seat height
• How to use your child’s seat height to go balance bike shopping, and
• Additional balance bike features to consider

Example of kids balance to pedal bike – smarTrike Xtend 3-in-1

Learning In The Right Environment

Parents, this tip can take some ingenuity on our behalf. However, it’s essential that we can provide suitable learning experiences within an environment that is safe and best suited to your child’s current skill set.

If your little rider has just started on their first balance bike, solid non-road surfaces such as purpose-built bike/pedestrian paths that are relatively flat, have little or no pedestrian/bike traffic or obstacles are absolutely perfect.

You can even explore outdoor tennis or basketball courts.

Not only are these a flat, open space with a great learning surface, but you can incorporate the line markings into games. For example, trying to ride along the painted lines, stopping at a line that makes a T-intersection or incorporating witches-hats to make a fun riding circuit.

Most purpose-build bicycle paths have surrounding gravel or grass, therefore as their confidence develops, encourage them to punch over these different surfaces and do some exploring.

This will extend and challenge their skills and keep them in what we like to call the learning zone.

We will come back to this shortly in our Learning to Slow Down and Stop section.

This zone of optimal learning (learning zone), somewhere between our comfort zone and impossible zone, is research backed and has psychological credibility.

It is known in educational psychology as the zone of proximal development (ZPD) and was introduced, yet not fully developed by Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934).

We hope the above illustration helps to provide a simple, visual image that captures the essence of how the right learning environment will work wonders for your child’s bike riding education.

Learning to Walk, Run and Glide

OK, so we have the right bike, the right size and fit and the right environment to learn on, so let’s get rolling.

You will find that your child with intuitively begin to walk on their balance bike while seated. The saddle height, once fitted correctly, should enable your child to have their feet almost flat on the ground when seated (heels just slightly raised is fine).

These first steps on the bike will most likely be very slow and cautious as your little rider holds onto the handlebars and begins to steer for the first time as they move forward. More energetic, adventurous kids will take-off pretty quickly and most likely lose control of the steering before long.

This is all part of the learning process and perfectly natural.

The next progression you will notice, will be that your child will begin to run and scoot along at greater speeds. This will again test their ability to steer and guide their bike safely in a relatively straight line, providing yet another practical reason to choose a quiet riding environment, at least initially for their learning.

OK, my child is walking and running along but how do we encourage them to glide and essentially, begin to balance?

The strategy to use is simple and can be implemented to teach any new skill, concept, idea or technique.

Try following our 4-Steps to Learning Model;

1. explain the skill and why it’s important
2. demonstrate the skill through modelling
3. check understanding by asking and encouraging questions, and
4. allow child to go and practice / explore the skill on their own

Here’s a practical example of what this might look like when parents are teaching your child how to glide on a balance bike.

• You have a conversation with your little rider along the lines of. “You know when you run along and build up a little speed, or when the ground begins to angle downhill, this is a great time to glide along without using your legs. You can glide by lifting your feet up in front of you, just be sure to keep a firm grip on your steering and look forward “
• you can show them this skill as a parent on your own bike. Have them watch as you model this by riding past them with your feet up in front of you and gliding. Even better, if you have a buggy or rear child seat on your bike, discuss the skill as your riding then demonstrate this as they are watching you from this privileged viewing position in the buggy or seat
• now you can ask, “what do you do when you would like to glide? see if they mention the feet up, firm grip on the steering and look forward ideas. “Do you have any questions about gliding?”
• now, with your encouragement and support, let them get our there and try to glide on their own

That’s it!

You will find that almost instantly your little rider will be gliding along nicely. Some key points to look out for as you allow them to enjoy this new-found ability.

Allow them to explore the skill.

By giving them the opportunity to make mistakes, try again, make more mistakes, try again, have success, make mistakes, repeat, you are keeping them in the learning zone (ZPD) nicely. Your role, as always is to provide positive encouragement, support and keep things fun!

Learning to Slow Down and Stop

The next step in their learning will again be intuitive for most little riders, but giving them some helpful pointers is absolutely worthwhile, particularly if your child is a spirited, energetic rider that has already learnt how to gather some speed.

Naturally, kids will place their feet down onto the ground to slow down and stop, which is good thing. However, this can be problematic if your child is overly aggressive as they touch the ground, causing them to lose balance and possibly fall.

Encourage gentle taps of the ground to slow down gradually and come to a stop.

Even better, explain to them what happens when they ride on different surfaces such as gravel or grass. To a young rider, grass in particular is a balance bike without brakes best friend when it comes to wanting to slow down and stop.

By following the 4-Steps to Learning Model above, teach them how to use other surfaces to slow down and stop by steering their bike onto these slower surfaces.

Again, you will be amazed at just how quickly they learn this important skill and the confidence they will gain in knowing they have the ability to control their bike’s speed when needed.

As mentioned, this skill takes on extra significance for balance bikes without brakes.

Parent Patience and Encouragement – The Fun Factor

Finally, we wish to close our post with three important points.

First, we want to encourage you as parents in the wonderful role your will be taking on in teaching your child to ride a bike. This is no easy task, for any parent.

So firstly, be encouraged in the efforts that you are and will be making to introduce and educate your child in the wonderful lifelong skill of riding a bike. As mentioned earlier, this can have amazing benefits for your child throughout their lifetime.

Second, be the ultimate source of encouragement for your riding champion. For some parents, this may come quite naturally. For others, it may be a challenge to verbalize your emotions and give continual positive praise.

Regardless of where you sit on the ability to encourage spectrum, by attempting to uplift and inspire, displaying patience with their efforts, and showing an interest, you are ultimately modeling the attitude you wish for them to show to others.

Your simply saying, regardless of the results, I’ve got your back, I’m your champion! And that’s simply brilliant!

Our third and final point is to keep the learning to ride your bike experience fun.

You are ultimately just spending time with your child, having fun and sharing new adventures together. Enjoy the opportunities that teaching your child how to ride a bike brings.

Be present and happy in knowing that you’re sharing the challenges and celebrating the successes with your little one along the journey.

Conclusion

We have covered a lot of ground here and we thank you for taking the time to invest in what we believe to be a wonderful, life changing skill by teaching your child to ride a bike.

A quick summary of what you have learnt today;

• why the skill of balance should be learnt first and is so important when learning to ride a bike
• how to find the right size and correctly fit a balance bike for your child
• how to teach your child to ride in the right environment
• how to teach your child to walk, run and glide
• how to teach your child to slow down and stop
• how to be a patient and encouraging parent, plus the importance of making their learning fun

As always, we encourage you to please leave your comments and questions below about anything to do with this article or with the world of balance bikes.

In our next article, Part 2, the final in our series we will be covering how to teach your child to ride a pedal bike.

Happy riding!