Thought of the Day 03.04.10

My oldest son, Spencer, has been riding a bicycle since he was three years old. However, he’s always had training wheels. Well, a few months ago, I decided he was old enough to try riding without them. It was a disaster. He simply had no sense of balance whatsoever, so we put them back on. Then just this week, he was begging to try again, so I agreed.

Whenever he would start to fall over, I’d yell at him, “Balance! You’ve got to balance!” But even as I said this, I realized that it’s not as if he’s forgetting to do so or disobeying me. He doesn’t know how. And if he doesn’t know how to balance, then sternly commanding him to do the impossible doesn’t help. Only now have I grasped that the fault here was mine. Not because there are four steps to balance I should have taught him. There aren’t. It’s an indivisible physical skill, learned by doing. The fault is I never realized why they’re called “training” wheels.

It’s because you’re supposed to raise them gradually over time so the child learns to balance with diminishing assistance. And leaving them all the way down, I had essentially ingrained in him bike riding with no need to balance whatsoever, a highly counterproductive habit to real riding. So I had trained him to be inept and then was frustrated at him for not doing what I hadn’t equipped him to be able to do.
Oh, the dangers of avoiding dangers!