Stabilisers - does it matter?

[CarolineIngalls]

My 3.5 year old has outgrown her 12 inch balance bike.

We bought a lovely secondhand islabike cnoc 16 (14 was too small to bother). We took the pedals off but she's a touch too short for it be a comfortable balance bike (just her toes touch).

She saw the pedals and stabilisers and insisted she could ride. She can. The nursery taught her.

The stabilisers won't really set her back, will they? She is so keen and it will be a few months before she's tall enough to take the pedals off.

She's my 3rd kid. I know this doesn't matter - and yet I fret. Reassurances welcome.

Nope they won’t set her back. Our ds started on the same Isla bike with stabilisers. By the age of 5 he had no stabilisers and was cycling confidently long distances. At age 7 on a trip to New Zealand he did huge distances up and down steep hills.
I don’t believe the fashion for balance bikes makes a difference long term to a child’s cycling ability.

Try her with pedals and without stabilisers. My daughter went straight from balance bike to two wheeler at age 3 after being on a balance bike. Worth a shot.

I found stabilisers a PITA. Our pavements are worn and the stabilisers didn't sit well on them. The DCs had a good foundation on balance bikes and the stabilisers put them off just trying to get on with it. The breakthrough came when DS2's stabilisers kept falling off so he had to get on with it. That then motivated DS1 to get on with it as his younger brother had already suceeded!

Our dc all had stabilisers. When they were ready to try without stabilisers, we took both stabilisers and pedals off. They used their bikes like balance bikes and asked for the pedals to be put back within a week or so. Once the pedals were back on they were cycling properly within a weekend.

I'm a coach at a children's cycling club and I used to think that balance bikes were a gimmick (I taught my own children using stabilisers) but now I am a complete convert.
The difficult bit about cycling is balance. Children learning on a balance bike learn to balance first, and they discover intuitively what happens when they shift their weight around the bike. Adding pedals is usually pretty easy once they have mastered balance.
Riding a bike with stabilisers on is like riding a tricycle. You can't move the bike around underneath you or lean into corners etc in the same way as you do on a bicycle. So those things need to be learned separately when the stabilisers come off. Of course they can be learned (that is how most of us did it after all) but a child who has been riding a balance bike well before getting pedals often does a lot of it instinctively. I have observed a tendency for ex balance bikers to be more confident, more fluid riders who handle their bikes more naturally. I wouldn't claim that that difference lasts indefinitely and of course it isn't true for everyone, but I think it is the better way for most children to learn.
As advised in British Cycling training materials, we strongly discourage our riders' parents from putting stabilisers on when they add pedals. It isn't necessary and it can set some children back. They sometimes lose the confidence they have built up on their balance bikes as stabilisers can send the subliminal message that they are doing something difficult/ dangerous. Because they don't need to balance, and also can't use transfer of weight around the bike to control it in the same way, those skills can be damaged. I have seen this happen to a few kids when their parents have insisted on putting stabilisers on actually. They have become very rigid on the bike, when they had a nice relaxed posture previously and a couple were very reluctant to ride without stabilisers later, even though they had great balance before. Obviously that's just my personal experience and some children won't be affected at all but it can undo some of the work done previously in certain children.
However, I would imagine that if a child had good skills on the balance bike before and they don't spend too long on stabilisers then any regression would be corrected fairly quickly afterwards. I am certainly not saying that if you put your child on stabilisers they are doomed forever and will never ride a bike competently again. But in my experience of coaching a large number of children from preschoolers up, I would say that progressing directly from balance bike to pedals is the easiest, most effective and most fun way for most children and most parents most of the time. And I have seen some children's skills regress if they go from a balance bike to a pedal bike with stabilisers.