Take the pedals off the bike

I recently was trying to teach my youngest daughter how to ride her bike without training wheels. I did so in the usual manner - have her sit on the seat while I grab the handlebars and run along side her, then release the bike and watch her panic, freeze, topple over, and kick the bike in frustration.

We just need to do this about thirty times and she’ll have it down, right?

I mean, that's the way I learned to ride a bike, as well as everybody else I know. Unfortunately, it wasn't working very well. My daughter was getting increasingly frustrated, and I figured we just had to power through until one day it magically clicked. My wife figured there had to be some better way that we were missing, so she started googling.

Turns out there is a better way: take the pedals off the bike.

What?

Nobody had every told me this. Nobody I know has ever done this with their kids. I have had zero contact with this information for my entire life.

And you know what? It totally works.

You present your kid with a pedal-free bike and tell them to straddle the seat with their feet touching the ground. Then you tell them to kind of just run the bike forward. Then, once they have enough speed, they need to lift their legs and try to coast. At first they can only manage a half second, but that soon becomes a full second, then two seconds, then three, and then they can coast for a whole block. Not every kid masters it in a single day, but it's much easier and far less scary to learn than the old way.

Once the kid reliably gets the bike up to speed and can coast upright, you simply put the pedals back on. They quickly learn to pedal, and poof! Now they can ride a bike.

This method works so well because it teaches the most important and fundamental skill first – balance, and saves pedaling to sustain speed for later. Bicycles achieve balance through the gyroscopic effect, something with angular momentum and physics or whatever. The faster the wheels go, the more stable they are. This is deeply counterintuitive to kids for whom slowing down feels "safe" and going fast feels "scary." Taking the pedals off lets them explore this mysterious new fact about the world in a much simpler and less scary way.

EDIT 1/14/2025: this article went viral on hacker news and now I have a bunch of comments telling me the above is wrong; mea culpa, I was never great at physics and apparently copy-pasting the explanation from the first google hit for "how do bikes stay upright" is not trustworthy in 2025. All I really care to say is that there's something mysterious and ineffable about balancing on a bike when you're a little kid that's hard to master when you're also trying to get a grip on pedaling, and your every instinct is to brake whenever you get scared, which will immediately tip you over.

Once they've got that down, adding pedaling to the mix is fairly easy. But if you rely on the traditional method, a kid can’t make any progress until the first moment they manage to master both lessons simultaneously; a method far costlier in terms of time, skinned knees, and tears.

Okay, cool, we found a neat trick for making bike riding easier, but if I'm being honest, "break complex tasks down into simpler ones" wasn't exactly a revelation in fundamental pedagogical principles for me.

But what was a revelation was that taking the pedals off was even an option.

From now on, whenever I'm trying to learn something (or teach it to someone else), the first thing I'm going to ask myself is, "how do I take the pedals off?"