Thetford Academy Principal Michael Fordham shares his personal perspective on teaching children to ride bikes, championing balance bikes over traditional stabilisers.
All new parents will know there is no end to the list of people lining up to offer advice on how to bring up your children, but one bit of advice I’m glad I heard and acted on was how to get children riding a bike.
The traditional method, and the one I learnt back in the 1980s, was to start with a tricycle, then a bike with stabilisers, and finally to remove them. For young children there’s instant success: they can ride almost immediately.
But the advice I received when my children were born was not to use stabilisers, and instead to put them on a balance bike from a young age. A balance bike is a two-wheeled bike with no pedals. They move around on it, learning how to balance as they go. Only when they can do that do they graduate to pedals. Stabilisers do not feature in this model. I taught both my children to cycle using this method. They rode balance bikes (at increasingly fast speeds) until they were four, and then I stuck them straight on pedal bikes. In both cases, it took less than two hours before they were riding independently.
There is a metaphor here for how we learn other things. There is a temptation to put scaffolds in place (like stabilisers) that make it appear we are doing the actual thing, when actually we are not. If we remove the stabilisers, we just fall over. Whereas if we invest the time learning the bit that is difficult (in this case balancing) then the upfront investment in time can pay off in the long run.
