Sometimes, as a parent, the best thing you can do is just get out of the way. This is a parenting lesson that has been hard-learned: to give my kids the chance to discover their own wonder in the world, to pursue their own interests, and to not hover over them all the time intervening in whatever they’re up to.
As someone to whom bikes are pretty important – not just as a physical object and mode of transport but as a portal to catharsis – that lack of intervention in their riding journey has been challenging. I didn’t want to be too pushy, and in turn push them away. I’ve modelled, I hope, that riding is good and riding is fun. But my love for them (or time with them) has never been conditional on needing bikes to be involved.
Iain Treloar
As such, there have been peaks and lulls in their riding journeys. My older daughter, nine years old, learnt to ride without training wheels before she was four, and is sometimes extremely amped about it and other times completely ambivalent. My youngest, five years old, is yet to learn to ride: she is getting the hang of balance bikes, likes pedalling on a trailabike, and seems in no particular hurry to move things along.
Iain Treloar
So if bikes aren’t ruling the roost, what is? A near-endless parade of other wheeled things, that’s what. After careful study of their pros and cons, here they are, along with an academically rigorous rating scale.
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