Around Christmas of 2011, we got a Strider balance bike for Sophia (then 4).  In case you’re not familiar with balance bikes, they’re so smart!  When kids learn to ride bicycles with training wheels, they inherently learn to ride unbalanced.  (They generally tip over onto one training wheel and just ride along like that.)  Then they have to unlearn this bad habit in order to ride a “real” bicycle later.

Balance bikes avoid this problem.  They’re shaped like (small) regular bikes, but without pedals.  And children ride them the same way they ride those toddler ride-on toys — they walk/run their feet along the ground to propel them.  When they’re ready, they can lift up their feet and glide.  If they get unbalanced, the bike starts to tip — which is self-correcting — but they can just put their feet down to stop themselves falling over, so they’re still safe.  Rather than inherently learning to tip to one side, they’re inherently learning to balance.

Anyway, so we got a Strider bike for Sophia Christmas-before-last.  Unfortunately, she stubbornly decided she was too big for it (not too grown up, just literally too big) and refused to ride it.  (She wasn’t.  And she still can’t ride a “real” bike.)  Fortunately, the bike adjusts to a wide size range (by raising/lowering the seat), so I just had to wait for Livia to get big enough for it.

We took it out last week to try it.  Livia is recently-turned-two, and she’s teeny-tiny, so I had to put the seat allll the way down.  But she was so tickled to try riding a bike!

You may notice she’s just standing over it; she does fit on the seat, she just hasn’t figured out yet about sitting down on it.  And she’s really just trudging along at this point.  But it’s a start!  And she’s learning to balance.  (You will also notice that we haven’t adjusted the helmet to her head yet.  She wasn’t really doing much yet, so I wasn’t worried about her hurting her head.  But even she knew that the helmet went with riding a bike. 🙂  We’ll get it better adjusted before next time, now that I realize this is not the helmet her big sister has been using.)

Although I didn’t manage to capture it effectively in any of these photos, she really was thrilled to be riding a bike like a big girl.  And I can be confident that she’s learning the “right” way.  (In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if she learned to ride a “real” bike before Sophia!)  Better still, this will adjust to her as she grows — and then when she has transitioned to a bike with pedals, her little brother/sister will be growing into this one.

I can hardly wait for the weather to warm up “for good” so we can put this to more frequent use.

Do you have any experience with balance bikes?

Disclosure: Strider provided me with a steeply-discounted bicycle to facilitate my review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.