Learning to ride a bike

[Merename]

Buying a bike for DDs 4th bday this week. She’s never spent much time on her balance bike as she quickly grew too tall, but loves her scooter and is very confident. I’ve watched a few vids about learning to ride and I understand that stabilisers are not encouraged these days, should I just go straight to trying to help her learn to ride without them? Or if she has stabilisers for a while, will it be hard for her to give them up? Is 4 too young? What have your experiences been?

As for wasting money comment - DS learned to pedal when he weighed 15kg. A 7kg or more toys r us bike would not have been suitable. The first hill and he'd have struggled (as would I on a 30kg bike, for example). So we paid a small fortune, but sold it a year later for £40 less than original purchase price and bought the size up with the exact money from the sale. He's had the size up for 1.5 years now. When we come to sell that in about a year I reckon I can get about £40 less than what we paid for it. So circa £80 for 3.5 years of quality bikes that he's already ridden many hundreds of miles on, including to school and back every day plus long cycle routes in holidays is very much worth it for us. But it is a big initial outlay, granted.

My dc, along with many others were also lightweights when they learnt, they still did so easily enough. Quite apart from the fact the whole take pedals off an expensive lightweight bike wasn't a thing, personally it would have been the waste of money, rather than actual cost. However millions of uk families struggle with the cost of a £30 new bike, and yet their dc learn just as well.