My facebook feed is full of children’s bike advertisements right now; I guess it’s that time of year and some wonderful AI has worked out that my daughter is about the age that we’re thinking about this. They all seem to promise that your child will learn to ride a bike in a couple of hours, or in one day, or something equally quick and painless.
The internet tells me it can take from between 45 minutes and a few weeks to learn. So have we become so impatient as parents that we will prioritize hurrying through this rite of passage for our kids? And spend a significant amount of money on a bicycle that promises it’ll be quick and painless for all?
I have a doctoral student who is really interested in understanding how students persist when learning in difficult. This actually really matters when students are struggling with complicated concepts and novel problems. And I wonder if this is something we can prepare kids for in their early years? Should we really be rushing them through a challenging experience in an effort to make our lives easier? Where there might be something else they are learning from the struggle to learn something new? As parents, especially parents with jobs outside their homes who have limited time to spend with their children and don’t want to see them struggle, are we doing the right thing?
This is hard. There is no doubt about that. Preparing kids to persist when learning is hard is really important, but it is way easier as parents to let our little kids skip the struggle (and let us teach them to ride a bike in an afternoon rather than over multiple weeks). But are we missing the real learning that needs to be happening?
And yes, my toddler has had a balance bike for a couple of years, because it seemed like the best choice (and it was available 2nd hand when I was looking for some sort of bike for her). But I do worry that in this rush to let kids skip the struggle we’re setting ourselves up for a harder time later on.
