Teaching an adult to ride a bike is easy. This is how:

1. You hand them a smaller bike so they can comfortably reach the ground.
2. You instruct them to not focus on going in any particular direction, but instead always steer into the fall.

That’s it. That’s the whole trick to cycling. 99 % of the time, the handlebars are only there to keep the bike under your body. 1 % of the time you use the handlebars to upset the balance to initiate a turn.

---

The reason we cannot do this with children is they don’t yet have the generalised motor skills and cognitive abilities to handle a complex instruction like that. Yet I have had two children ending up as relatively competent cyclists at age three, and their training was based on two principles:

• What’s difficult is balance, not pedaling, and
• Fast, accurate feedback wins.

These are probably obvious principles to anyone reading this, but here’s how to put them into practice, in three easy steps.1¹ Well, actually there’s a zeroth step: your children will be more motivated to learn if they watch you use a bike to get around. So get a bike and use it if you don’t already.

1. Start the children on a bicycle without pedals. The goal is to learn the dynamics of the bicycle and how it reacts to steering input, since that’s the critical bicycling skill.

   It's a bonus if the bicycle has at least one handbrake. This both saves shoes (which are otherwise used as brake pads against the ground) and it teaches how to brake with hands, which is the better way to brake on a bicycle.2² There are myths that children don’t have th hand strength to do that or whatever. Nah, brake levers adjusted for children are sufficient to stop the child. Also front brakes tend to be hand-operated only, and people should definitely learn to modulate the front brake to stop their bike without going over the handlebars. The rear brake is laughably ineffective in comparison. Many reasons to practice squeezing levers by hand!

2. Once the child is proficient at balance (can lift legs and coast through corners), or maybe just before proficiency, add pedals back in. Ideally use a bike that does not have a coaster (“foot”) brake, because the coaster brake interferes with learning pedaling. If the child can use a lightweight bicycle, that helps too.3³ Normal childrens’ bikes are almost as heavy as the child themselves. Imagine trying to learn cycling on a bike that weighs as much as you! Using a bike that the child is strong enough to lift themselves makes the feedback cycle faster. Lightweight children’s bikes are expensive, but they can be bought used and sold again a couple years later; they retain fairly good value.

   Pedaling upsets the balance of the bike, and this takes some time for the child to get used to. For faster feedback, we want to encourage them keeping their feet on the pedals, so at this point we will have to help out by holding the child upright. Hold the child, not the bike. A hack here is to sling a bath towel under their arms and use that to keep them up when the bike falls.

   Recall that the point of this is for the child to get familiar with how the bike dynamics change when pedaling. If we hold the bike, we mute some of its natural dynamics and learning will take longer. The reason we still hold the child is to shorten the feedback loop: it is easier to get up and going again with no new bruises.

3. Last step: teach basic traffic rules, such as keeping to the right4⁴ Or, I suppose, left as appropriate., stopping and looking both ways before crossing potential traffic, looking behind before stopping, etc.

This is as far as I’ve gotten, anyway. I’m sure it’ll be a lot of fun to teach more traffic rules and more advanced maneuvers, but for now they’re zooming around and discovering how useful bicycles are on their own.