How to teach a child to ride a bike without training wheels

The short version. Take the training wheels off. Find grass, not concrete. Hold the back of the bike, tell your child to pedal, and run alongside. Let go without announcing it. When they fall, help them back on. Then do it again tomorrow, and the day after that.

That is the method. Most of it is not about the bike. It is about how many days in a row you are willing to go outside.

The six things you actually do

1. Take the training wheels off. All the way off, with the bolts in your pocket. In our book Omar asks for them back three times, and that is a child being reasonable.
2. Go to grass. A lawn, a field, the flat part of the park. Omar falls in the soft grass on four pages of the book and is never hurt on any of them.
3. Check the helmet. On, buckled, and a good fit. The back of the book has seven safety rules for young riders, and the helmet is the first one.
4. Hold the back of the bike. Omar's Dad holds it from behind and runs, which leaves the steering to Omar. Hands on the handlebars means you are steering it.
5. Let go without announcing it. The day Omar finally rides on his own is the day he does not know his Dad has stopped running. He finds out when he turns around to ask a question.
6. Go again tomorrow. Three pages of the book begin "the next day." One short ride a day, and nothing dramatic happens on any of them.

The part nobody warns you about

Falling is not the hard part. Grass takes care of the falling.

The hard part arrives on about day four. Your child has gone down a dozen times, has worked out that this never happened with the training wheels on, and does not want to come outside. You are standing in the hall with two helmets, and the whole thing has stopped being fun for either of you.

This is the moment the method actually gets tested, and the answer is not a better grip or a flatter field.

Measure the distance, not the success

Here is the one thing worth changing in how you watch.

A parent watching for riding sees nothing happen for a week, and so does the child. A parent watching for distance sees something every day. Two feet, then five, then half the lawn, then the moment you realize you stopped running some time ago. The line the book uses for the whole second half is that Omar was riding further before falling.

Say the distance out loud. "You got to the tree that time." A child who has fallen all afternoon and gone twenty feet farther than yesterday has had a good day, and will not know it unless somebody tells them.

In the book, Omar says Bismillah as he gets back on, and his Mom's Masha'Allah comes when he rides. Saying both with your child, at the start of every try and at every new tree, makes each day's progress something you thank Allah for together.

What our book does with this

Omar Learns to Ride a Bike is these two weeks, from the child's side. Omar's grandparents give him a bright green bike with training wheels. His Dad brings out the toolbox. The wheels come off, and Omar falls, and falls again, and asks to go home and put them back on.

Then on the day he refuses to go outside at all, his Dad sits him on his lap and tells him about a baby who could not sit up. Who fell over learning to crawl, then learning to stand, then took one step and fell. The baby is Omar.

It is a picture book for ages 3 to 7, written to be read aloud, and that page is the reason it exists. It is a story about a Muslim family, and the Arabic and Spanish words they use, Bismillah and Masha'Allah among them, are explained at the back of the book, each with how to say it. If the hall-with-two-helmets day is coming, it helps to have already read about a boy it happened to.

Where this comes from. The method above is the one in our own book, and it is one family's. We make children's books, and we have not borrowed a claim from anyone who coaches riding for a living. The seven checks are the ones printed at the back of Omar Learns to Ride a Bike, cut down to what a child can check standing next to the bike.