Learning to Ride a Bike

As a parent you should get a memo sent to you maybe once every 3 months or so that says the following:

Dear Parent,

Please remember that your child does not naturally know how to do anything that you don't explain to them. Try to remember this when you child is trying something new or even when its the 40th time they have tried it. The term practice makes perfect wasn't derived out of thin air. You will receive this reminder letter again in three months. This letter will self destruct in 5 seconds.

Regards,

Parents of times past.

Teaching a child to do anything will remind you of this, but with something like learning to ride a bike it is pronounced. Why you might ask? Well...everything is much more important for the child to grasp immediately. If you have a child like ours if failure is experienced in the early going then quitting or flat refusal to try is monumentally more likely. Especially if no training wheels are present.

As a parent you explain how to move the kickstand, get started riding, the need to pedal to keep moving trying to keep balance and don't forget to watch where you are going, etc. etc. This is all done in a quick 5 minute debrief that your 5-8 year old child is to absorb and commit to memory and then apply with great alacrity upon the first attempt to ride the bike.

Now you are practicing and you can see the child's brain working all the cogs and wheels spinning at a painstakingly slow pace. So you find yourself walk-trotting next to a child holding the back of the seat even possibly the handle bars while saying instructions loudly in hopes that louder will make the child process the instructions more efficiently.

Your neighbors are peaking out the window because they keep hearing someone saying in a loud voice things like "STEER", "RIGHT, TO THE RIGHT", "PEDAL...PEDAL...KEEP PEDALING", "TURN...TURNING...KEEP TURNING" "STOP...STOP!" Periodically a child screeching or flat our screaming perhaps crying. These same neighbors then see a parent change their tune to low volume of encouraging statements to cajole their child into trying again.

This goes one for weeks at a time. Why do we do this to ourselves? I'll tell you why. Because as parents we remember all the time we spent as kids riding over hill and dale and anywhere else those two wheels would take us. The adventures that we had both real and imagined. So with these fond memories in our minds we convince/cajole our children into learning to ride a bike and create their own adventures.

But here is the problem...we live in a different time now, where we barely allow our children to go anywhere without us until they are in their teens. Its not "safe" or at least society dictates that we as parents should not allow our children out of our sight for more than a millisecond. How can we expect children to make the same kind of memories that we had if there is no opportunity for them to go out and experience life as we did. Sadly I am of a mind that we do live in a different time and I don't feel great about the idea of letting my child run footloose and fancy free around the neighborhood, but we are working to find ways for her to create memories and have adventures, but in what would be considered safe under today's standards.

In the mean time we are walk-trotting next to the bike and drawing the attention of our neighbors. Happy parenting everybody!