Like Learning to Ride a Bike

We gave Elliott a bike for his birthday last year, but I’ve been slow in teaching him how to ride. When we got back from our walk in the woods, I made it a point to give him a chance to practice every day.

The road in front of our house sees four or five cars a day at most. It’s generally a safe place to ride. We’d make a couple trips back and forth, up and down the hill with me running along beside him, holding on to the back of his seat. We’d do this two or three times before my back started to hurt and he’d want to go back to his scooter. He was faster on the scooter and he didn’t have dad loping along behind him the whole time. I’d sit at the side of the road and watch the kids, the girls on bike Elliott on his scooter. The only condition was that we had to do the two laps on the bike.

After doing this for a few weeks, my fingers getting ever lighter in their grip, he had it down. I’d let go for extended distances and he was riding his bike. He just didn’t know it yet. He was cruising along in that blissful space where he had no idea that he could fail. In his mind, no matter what happened, I was there to catch him so he could relax and be free.

One evening his sister noticed me letting go. She squealed in excitement and started to say something, but I managed to keep her quiet. I knew she’d tell him that night — they’re very loyal to each other — but I didn’t want him to discover it while he was doing it. It’s better to find out after the fact I think, to have that realization of not only can I do this, I already did it.

The next day he asked me if it was true and I said yes. He smiled and got on his bike and asked me for a push and he was off riding. For a couple days he needed me to give him a little push to get him started, but then one day I went to do that and he said “no, I don’t need any help.” And there you go.

If you know me or Corrinne it should come as no great surprise that our kids love to read. People often ask what we do out here in the woods all day, well, one answer would be: we read. These days nothing goes unread — packaging, labels, fine print, everything gets read.

This got me thinking about parenting. I’ve always said, only half joking, that all you really need to teach your kids is basic human kindness and how to read. The rest is information and experience they can seek out for themselves using those tools. Be kind and read the signs is the modus operandi of life.

I’ve since added cooking, spreadsheet formulas, compound interest, and edge cases in American tax code to my basic human curriculum, but I haven’t changed my overall approach, which has always been that the main job of being a parent is to keep your kids alive and stay out of their way as much as possible.

I’ve tried to do that, though sometimes it is hard. Mistakes have been made. One of my daughters is still getting over a fear of boats because I thought she’d be fine sitting on the floor of a canoe for a short paddle. She was not. She’s coming around though. This spring we’ll try again.

Sometimes you have to hold onto the seat. No one just rides a bike. No one just reads. No one want to sit on the bottom of a canoe. But I remain convinced that you should let go as soon as you can, probably sooner than you think you should.