Why riding a bike with stabilisers is fine, and a Victorian ghost for Christmas
In the "festive perineum" between Christmas and New Year, there's a lot of time to kill. Alas, I was in charge of a four year old, whose appetite for sitting down quietly with a book is famously limited. I was desperate, therefore, to encourage him to play with his Christmas present.
A year ago, I got him his first "real" bike, eg. one with pedals and brakes. He'd been happily scooting along on his balance bike since he was twenty months old, and the received wisdom is that kids who learn to ride a balance bike can skip the stabiliser stage entirely and graduate straight to a pedal bike.
As a cycling-mad dad, I was excited for this to happen. I bought him the yellow bike he craved and we went out for a test ride this time last year – after a little persuasion from me, he was able to ride solo, while constantly shouting at me not to let go.
As 2023 progressed, though, he didn't want to ride his bike. Despite being an all-round thrillseeker/daredevil, he was afraid of falling off and never wanted to take the bike out when we went to the park. All my reassurances that I'd catch him, that he'd be okay if he did fall, fell on deaf ears.
The need for stability
Eventually he started asking for stabilisers. I felt shamed: I'm a Cycling Dad™! My kid could ride a balance bike before some kids learn to walk! This was a regression! I tried to convince him that he could already ride the bike and would only be delaying learning to ride without stabilisers. Who was I kidding – trying to use reason and logic on an under-five is a fools' errand.
As usual, my partner Maddy had the right answer. I needed get over myself and stop trying to impose the "right" way of doing this on our son. The goal was to get him to ride his bike – the specific mechanics of how he did it were basically irrelevant. If he needed stabilisers for a while to convince him he was safe, then just get him the stabilisers. So for Christmas 2023, that's what I did.
It was an exercise in humility: he immediately wanted to ride his bike again. Watching him make his first tentative movements, I was reminded how many new things he was having to learn: how to brake, how to position the pedals, how to ring his bell while riding, how to step over the frame. The stabilisers at least enabled him not to fall over while he was focusing on doing all these new things.
It made me reflect on why I'd felt the need to enforce doing it a certain way, just because it was the most desirable/"ideal" outcome. What I had actually wanted was to go out and ride my bike with my son – and I can do this, now, because he's confident enough to ride solo because the stabilisers have reassured him.
He's already working out that they're slowing him down, and that other kids his age don't have them. I suspect by the time he turns five in April, he'll be asking me to take them off. Hopefully I'll have also developed my abilities a little too, and won't be so rigidly insistent on one way of doing things in future.
Mini feels this week
Voices through time
While taking my son for a festive bike ride, we ended up passing through the local cemetery in the village church. He asked me about the graves and I told him what they were. He asked if any children were buried there, and I confirmed they were. He asked where, and started sizing up the smaller graves against his height, assuming they were for kids.
Eventually I found one dating from the mid-1800s, which was the resting place of James, aged 3 years and 8 months. I quietly showed my son, and he—uncharacteristically—became pensive and quiet, kneeling down beside the grave to look at it. I started to think about this child, buried in a different time, and how his parents must have felt as they stood at this spot all those years ago. I choked back tears as I tried not to think about this fate befalling my own son, barely a year older than this child had been.
As my eyes watered, my son reached out to stroke the rose engraved at the top of the headstone and said "I miss you, James". Just for a moment, this Victorian child, long-departed, was brought back to life—albeit only as a memory—as a little boy who might otherwise have been his friend but for the gap of a century or two made a connection between them. Quietly crying as I watched, I put my arm round my son and showed him where the best tree to climb was.
That's it for this edition – the first of 2024! Thanks for subscribing, and share a link to your friends if you like what you read here. See you next week!