A couple of months ago we decided to get Nathan a bike with pedals, since we thought he was ready to move on from his balance bike. We went to the bike shop and were undecided about choosing between a little bike that he probably wouldn’t fit for much longer, maybe 6 months or so before he would be at the top of the height range for it, or a bigger bike where he was right at the bottom of the size range. They both had training wheels on them, and in the shop (with the help of the training wheels) it looked like he would get the hang of either bike pretty quickly. We decided to go with the bigger bike because Nathan would get many years of use out of it.
After we got the bike home, it was clear pretty quickly that if Nathan had a smaller bike then we would be able to dispense with the training wheels. After all, the idea using the balance bike for the last 18 months was that he wouldn’t need training wheels at all. However, because the new bike is so big for him, he didn’t have the strength or length in his legs to hold the bike up when stationary, so he relied on the training wheels to keep the bike upright when getting moving and stopping. Another problem with the training wheels is that they are wider than him and the bike, and so Nathan could mis-judge gutters or obstacles which would cause problems when his training wheels ran over them.
Yesterday we went back to the bike shop to look at the smaller bikes, and at first the lady serving in the shop couldn’t really understand why we wanted a smaller bike. She said Nathan fit on the bike we had, and that we could expect him to use training wheels for quite a while. In the end we bought the smaller bike, they took the training wheels off for us, and we took it home. It really is what we should have done in the first place. About ten minutes of trying to ride the bike on our drive-way and on the footpath, and Nathan had the hang of the bike and was zipping around on it pretty confidently…..without training wheels. Yay! And we already have the next bike for when Nathan grows out of his new one. 🙂
makes me wonder if we should have just taken the training wheels off the bigger one and see how he managed 🙂 he loves it though, look at the face in the 1st photo 🙂
The People at our cycling club firmly beleive that no child should ever be given a bike with trainign wheels. I guess this helps confirm their statement. The right bike is so much better.
That is really interesting. We were sure that Nathan didn’t need training wheels after 18 months on a balance bike, We just needed to find him the right bike and that is a bit hard when he didn’t know how to pedal when we were in the shop trying bikes out.