4 year old has never used balance bike - where do I start?

[Twothirtyam]

My daughter turns four vv soon and I really want to get her a bike and get her cycling. She’s never had a balance bike but it seems pointless to buy one when she’ll likely grow out of it really quickly. I’ve been doing lots of research but am overwhelmed by how expensive some of the bikes are. I feel like I’m going round in circles and need some solid advice on what to buy her and how to approach it! Please help!

Squish is a similar quality to frog. We've had an Islabike, frog and squish here (all second hand) and they're all good. I agree with the buying a normal bike and just taking the pedals off for a bit. Good luck.

@bruffin

Just get a normal bike but I would not recommend stabilisers - I don’t think they help. HOw do you think children used to ride a bikes before balance bikes. I learned to ride a bike with stabilisers back in the 70s, my kids are 25 and 23 learnt by themselves using stabilisers, it was the normal way of riding bike and we all learned that way and it wasnt a problem

www.littlebigbikes.com/why-not-use-stabilisers/

I learned with stabilisers myself but there is a logic to going from balance bike to pedals.

I got my 5 year old a bike recently in a charity shop. She just picked it up really quickly!

Another vote for a second hand islabike. If you find a Cnoc 14 for around £200 or under you'll be able to sell it for a similar amount (just make sure its not a super old one, with the chunkier seat and solid black islabike decal).

Take the pedals off and use it as a balance bike. Once dc is confident whizzing along, coasting round corners, etc then you can add the pedals.

I know islabikes seem crazy expensive, but they hold their value incredibly well. We bought ds his first Cnoc for £220, he rode it daily for 2 years (nursery and school run, trips to the park, etc), it got banged up and scraped and I sold it for £150. So it worked out as roughly the same cost as a new Halford bike. We then used the £150 towards his next second hand isla bike.

DC1 had a bike with stabilisers. He learned to ride without aged 5, after a couple of hours whizzing round on DC2's new (well new to us, was second hand balance bike). DC2 started zooming round on the nee balance bike at the same time, then aged 3. You can go much much faster on a balance bike than a bike with stabilisers and go on uneven ground, she rapidly abandoned the bike with stabilisers completely. 6 months later, aged just over 4, she made the move to a proper bike without stabilisers at over a year younger than her older brother. From experience, they can learn with stabilisers but it's faster with a balance bike - it teaches them the hard part of balancing first, rather than the easier part of pedaling.

Stabilisers can help. My children did balance bikes but struggled to understand pedaling, often pedaling backwards because it was easier......

Balance bike first for balance, pedal bike with stabilisers for pedal motion / muscle memory ( we still had the balance bike too), then stabilisers off for more speed!

I miss those days!

I'm a cycling coach and I run the under 5 group at our club.
I would agree with most of what has already been said. A regular bike with pedals off is probably the best choice now as larger balance bikes are harder to come by and may not be needed for long. Balance bike methodology, whether it is with an actual balance bike or a pedal bike with the pedals off is a much better way to learn to ride than using stabilisers as the rider learns the fundamentals of balance and transfer of weight around the bike right from the start.
I'd also agree with getting a decent quality bike. The brands mentioned alreasy are good but there are others. Cheap, heavy bikes make things very difficult for small children and are a false economy really. As previously mentioned the resale values on good brands are high so whilst the initial outlay is higher, you'll get plenty back.
We base our club sessions on British Cycling's Ready Set Ride programme which you can access for free at www.readysetride.co.uk
We've had great success using this and it gives a good structure to follow. We get quite a few parents coming to our club saying that they've bought their child a balance bike but it "hasn't worked". That's usually because the parents have assumed that the child will figure out how to ride intuitively, which to be fair, some kids do,but often they need some guidance to progress. If you work through the activities in the programme most children pick it up fairly quickly.

Looking at this thread with interest. Got DD a balance bike, an absolutely beautiful pendleton somerby second hand when she was 2, now she's 3.5 and flat out refuses to go on it, because it isn't pink 😬

I refuse to fork out for another one because of the colour though!

She'd rather use her old smartrike because it's purple which is close enough to pink but after a few minutes doesn't want to peddle anymore so we end up pushing her and she's getting too big for it.

She's also not too hot on steering but that'll come she's still young.

Cheap bikes are heavy and have dreadful geometry. If you want to make it really hard for your kid to learn to ride, buy a cheap bike and add stabilisers to it.

DS has one of these Strider bike and a pedal kit at just turned 4. Expensive but worth it. Quality is phenomenal, they're light so easy to manoeuvre too.

He was already fairly whizzy on his cheapy balance bike but got this for Christmas, once he was used to the size and weight we put the pedals on and he cracked it in about half an hour. He was fairly single track minded about being able to ride though 😂

I think stabilisers are a disaster really. Much better to learn the balance first, then the pedals. I still remember feeling so disheartened and quite terrified by my dad removing the safely net of my stabilisers. Made me hate the bike id previously loved. Can't you buy a secondhand balance bike for a few months and then resell it and put the money towards a longer term replacement?

Thanks for all this advice! We went to the bike shop today and have bought a Frog, we’re picking it up tomorrow. I ideally wanted an Isla bike but my partner really didn’t want to buy secondhand without doing more research and as her birthday is a few days away we took the opportunity to have it ready for then! I’m really excited it looks so nice and I hope this will be the kick up the bum to getting all of us back on our bikes again! Mine has been gathering dust for five years it’s terrible.
@MrsAvocet thanks that’s such good advice and thanks for the link I’ll look at that I see there are videos too my daughter will enjoy looking at those.
@MummBraTheEverLeaking haha funny you say that about the pink as it’s also my daughter’s favourite colour but we were adamant we weren’t going to get a pink bike as we wanted something a bit more neutral! We’ve opted for a pink though as when it came down to it we knew she’d want to ride it more! 🙄