Finding one's own sense of balance
July 2006
On a lovely Takoma Park twilight stroll, I noticed a mother helping her daughter learn how to ride a bicycle without the training wheels. The mother leaned over to help keep the bike upright as the little girl nervously wobbled along.
Being able to balance atop two narrow wheels while pedaling forward directly contradicts most of what a six-year-old has learned about life and gravity so far. |
While the child struggled to simultaneously pedal, hold the handlebars straight, and not fall over, her mother kept up a soft, soothing stream of encouragement and advice. She reassured her daughter that she wasn’t falling, and that she could do this. The little girl beamed when she came to a stop, and with big-sister bravado, she boasted to her little brother that she had pedaled for 10 whole seconds that time!
When I was helping my own kids learn how to ride their bikes, I found that it was easy to teach them how to hold the handle bars steady, while pumping the pedals round and round. Unfortunately, it was much harder for me to teach them the most important bike riding skill: how to stay balanced on a bicycle without falling over.
Riding a bike, after all, is pretty unbelievable if you think too much about it or try to describe it in words. Being able to balance atop two narrow wheels while pedaling forward directly contradicts most of what a six-year-old has learned about life and gravity so far. The best feeble instruction I could come up with was something along the lines of, “When you learn how to do it, you’ll know how to do it!”
I vividly remember how frustrating it was trying to “teach” my kids how to stay upright on their bikes. “What do I do? What do I do?” they cried as they wobbled off. Keeping an optimistic smile plastered on my face, I would yell back: “Just keep on pedaling and don’t lean over too far!”
It’s so hard to teach kids how to balance, even on a bicycle, because they already know how to do it. Children are born with a miraculous, innate sense of balance—an inner gyroscope—that keeps them from falling over once they can push themselves upright. The same inner balance that allows a baby to sit up and a toddler to walk, will also allow the child to ride a bike.
Riding a bicycle isn’t really about balancing yourself on top of the bicycle—it’s about keeping the bicycle balanced underneath you. So in the end, learning how to ride a bicycle is more about confidence, and less about coordination. This explains why some children learn to ride their bike when they’re as young as three or four years old, and some kids don’t learn until much later.
As parents, we’re also struggling to become more confident. We learn to hold the bike steady while our kid climbs on, to say some encouraging words, then to give the bike a little push and let go. We learn to trust that our kids will figure out what they need to do, and that they will be OK.
For kids, learning how to ride a bike means finding their own sense of balance and learning to trust it. I suspect that for many kids, they also have to learn to stop listening to all the “helpful” advice their parents are yelling at them (“Turn left! No, turn right! Now keep pedaling! DON’T HIT THE CURB!!!”).
Probably the hardest part of learning how to ride a bicycle is finding the courage to push past both logic and fear. Logic wants to tell a kid “this is impossible,” and fear is saying that “you could really get hurt!”
No wonder children who are just beginning to practice riding without the training wheels have their feet on the ground more often than on the pedals. They use their feet to steady themselves and to protect themselves from falling. But, with practice and growing confidence, kids begin to trust themselves to stay upright without their feet on the ground.
Finally, after all the falls, the tears, and the scary near misses—the moment when a child really learns to ride their bike comes so abruptly. One minute they don’t know how to do it, and the very next instant, they do. It’s amazing. It’s magic. The look of euphoric pride—and wonder—blazing on a child’s face at that moment is dazzling. This is what it is like to escape gravity, and fear. This is what it is like to learn how to fly.
Emory Luce Baldwin, LGMFT, is both an experienced parent educator with the Parent Encouragement Program (PEP) and a Family Therapist working with families with children and adolescents in Takoma Park and Kensington. For more information about the talk and other PEP classes and programs, contact PEP at 301-929-8824 or visit www.ParentEncouragement.org. To contact Emory, call 301-588-1451 or go to www.emorylucebaldwin.com.
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