Feet on the Pedals, Finally

Friends and I were marveling recently at how a well-chosen incentive can produce amazing results in one’s kids. Have you seen this? I don’t mean bribing, not really, not in the sense of trying to wheedle out of kids what they should be doing anyway (good behavior, chores, homework), but rather raising the stakes in a challenging situation to the point where the child sees the winning of the incentive as outweighing the difficulties of the task at hand. For example (I don’t think I’ve yet written about this, but if I have I apologize): helping my older two learn to ride a bike without training wheels. Ohmygoodness, that was a painful process. Every single bike session, for the years we’d tried to teach them, had been incredibly stressful. They would both get really excited about the idea of riding bikes, but when it came to the actual event, they would tend to fall apart after just a few minutes. It seemed they’d assumed they’d be expert riders as soon as they sat on the seat, and when they discovered that wasn’t the case, they’d lose interest. Which drove me cah-razy. “Come on, let’s try again,” I’d say, trying to be patient. “But I’ll never get it!” one of them would cry with anguish. “But I don’t know how to do it!” the other would yell with frustration. One would plop himself on the grass cross-legged, helmet on, and stare off into space; the other would take off his helmet and toss it while walking away muttering to himself. I felt we’d reached the crisis point the summer they were to turn eight and six, when they still didn’t know how to ride two-wheelers, even though much younger friends of ours had long since ditched their training wheels. For the first half of the summer, I worried and fretted and wrung my hands and nagged my husband to help them with the bikes (I had a nursing infant and no energy), but the summer was full to the brim with swimming lessons, trips to the lake, trips to visit family, and down time. The boys spent hours each day in the backyard, which has no paved surface for riding bikes (I wasn’t comfortable with them riding on the sidewalk or in the road without me), and I would wistfully yearn for the backyard of my childhood, which had a double wide driveway within the fenced-in area—it was perfect for safe riding! One day a mom friend of mine suggested putting the bikes in the backyard for them to ride. On the grass? With all the bumps? But I thought about it, and not too long after asked my husband if he would please just take the bikes out of the garage and put them in the backyard. It had started to make sense to me that, if the boys could just spend time with the bikes, without stress or pressure, getting acquainted with them, experimenting with them, that they might come to learn on their own. It sort of worked—they seemed to love having the bikes in the yard, and they used the incline from our house down into the yard to speed away on the training-wheel bikes and the little-kid trikes. They sat on the two-wheeler seats and walked themselves around the yard. They even got up on the top of the incline and let gravity pull them down into the yard with their feet out to the sides, just practicing balance. It was more progress without training wheels than they’d ever made. But there was still a wall they kept hitting—though they’d figured out the basic idea behind staying balanced on two wheels, neither of them could quite figure out how to get their feet up on the pedals without falling over. “It’s so haaarrdd,” one would say, flopping on the grass. “I’ll never do it,” another would whine, his face pressed up on the screen as he peered at me through the back door. “Can I come in now?” “I think we need to incentivize them,” I finally said to my husband. I didn’t mean anything big or expensive, just something that would give the last necessary bit of encouragement, and my husband had the perfect idea for our oldest boy. “When you can ride your bike expertly, I’ll bring you to Putnam Market and let you choose any cheese you want,” he told our son. Yes, indeed, my boy was (and is) a total turophile (a new word I learned just for this article! It means “a connoisseur of cheese; a cheese fancier”), and when he heard this news his face was immediately transformed—his eyebrows shot up nearly to his hairline, his mouth smiled wide—and he ran out into the yard and by lunchtime, a mere two hours later, he was riding around the yard on his two wheeler. Yes, he was. Another day or two and he was basically an expert. His cheese selection? A small hunk of a $17/lb asiago; it probably cost no more than $5. I’d thought that this turn of events would motivate my second son, and while he was indeed tremendously impressed with his big brother’s feat, it seemed to set him back a bit. He would watch his brother ride, despondently, convinced he would never learn. So we came up with an incentive for him as well—the replacement of his beloved, lost Millennium Falcon mini figure, which I think cost no more than $10. The response was immediate and enthusiastic, and off he went and learned to ride his bike that day. Yes, he did. I think one of the things that I liked the most about all this—besides the actual riding of the bikes, hallelujah!—was the sweetness of realizing my husband and I know our kids well enough to figure out the very thing—small but meaningful—that will light a fire under them. And watching them have fun on their bikes these years later makes me think the $12 we spent on their incentives was a wise investment indeed. Kate and her husband have six sons ages 12, 10, 8, 6, 4, and 2. She can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..