I took my son out bike riding yesterday. It has been really hard getting him to learn to ride. He just doesn’t have any desire. I know he’ll love it once he gets better at it, but until then all he wants to do is watch television and play video games. He complained and moaned about it and did the usual number of feigning fatigue and imbalance, and then he said he forgot how to ride, but eventually he got on the bike and started pedaling. He fell once and scraped the inside of his leg on the pedal, and wanted to use that as an excuse to quit. I still wouldn’t let him, though, and I think he finally realized that I wasn’t going to back down. He got on the bike again, and this time he managed to stay on. After fifty yards or so, his body seemed to remember what it was supposed to do, and he started picking up speed. He didn’t fall again (I ran alongside him almost the whole way just to make sure), and he rode for close to a mile before I let him quit for the day. I felt like a real bully for making him ride, and especially after the one spill. For a minute, I wondered if I was pushing too hard, if he might learn to hate bike riding because of me. But when he really got going, and he was riding on his own, the look on his face told me everything I needed to know. The pain in his leg, the video game he left off, and the cartoons he could be watching were all forgotten in favor of the wind on his face, the pavement racing past his feet, and the sheer exhilaration of accomplishment.
Update: I hadn’t thought about this before, but it would have saved me a huge amount of trouble: Remove the pedals and let him coast around to learn balance. Hat tip to Marlene the Home Maker at http://oikourgos.blogspot.com/2006/05/teaching-your-child-to-ride-bike.html.