I know what you’re thinking. “I learned to ride with training wheels!”
Well, no. You practiced pedaling on a tipsy, clumsy contraption with bolted-on afterthoughts that were never intended by the original bicycle designers.
You should get your kid started on a kick bike, stride bike, sidewalk bike, etc. These are generally small bicycles with no drivetrain. They move down the street by just kicking them along. This is the one we have hanging in our garage waiting for a cousin’s baby to grow a little bit:
By removing the drivetrain, the stride bike allows the young cyclist to focus on balancing, and not on pedaling. Balancing is the more difficult skill to learn and a stride bike is just the item to help with that. In fact, for adults learning to ride a bicycle, I would encourage them to remove their pedals before they start learning. When my sons transitioned to pedal bikes from their stride bikes, it took about three days of messing around on their pedal bikes for them to figure it out on their own. There was none of the classic dad-running-behind-kid stuff happening for our family! I got to relax (and wrench on bikes) while they figured-out on their own how to pedal their bicycles.
As for the skill of pedaling, and navigating in traffic, please read this blog post about the other bicycling contraption I recommend heartily.
