Balance Bikes and Training Wheels: What the Research Shows

Audience
Parents of children ages 2–6
Target length
~1,400 words
Status
Draft v1 (translated from Japanese v1)
Original
../62_bicycle_balance_bike.md

Lead

Most adults can remember the day they learned to ride a bike. Training wheels off, lurching forward, somehow staying upright. For many children, that moment becomes a prototype of the "I did it" feeling — one of the early, concrete experiences of mastery.

So when does that day come? And does it come sooner with a balance bike or with training wheels? Research from the 2020s is starting to give that ordinary question a fairly direct answer.