Re-adjusting the metaphorical training wheels

Last updated on: June 26, 2017 at 10:23 am by Jane the Actuary

Re-adjusting the metaphorical training wheels 2017-06-26T10:23:57-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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from flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dottiemae/5393326849

Did your children learn to ride their bikes with training wheels?

As I recall, my sister had training wheels, but when my parents bought a bike for me, they decided on one that would last further into childhood, even though it didn’t have training wheels. Dad then did the ol’ “hold the kid on the bike while running alongside” approach. Now, I have no idea how long it took to learn, though it was presumably far less time than the typical kid with training wheels, where it seems that the training wheels stay on the bike for years.

Our own kids learned by starting off with, for our oldest, a two-wheeled scooter, and, for the other two, a balance bike — for the middle one, this was while we lived in Germany, where it’s now the norm, called a “Laufrad” (literally “walk-wheel” – a play on “Fahrrad”, or bicycle, where the “fahr” is also the root for “fahren” or “to go/to ride”); for the youngest, we just brought the laufrad back to the U.S. with us. The balance bike seems to have made in-roads in bike riding-learning in the US, too, though it doesn’t seem to have replaced training wheels as the norm.

But “training wheels” has become a metaphor for the various ways in which young people learn to accomplish the tasks of adulthood — or, rather, it seems to me that it’s being used in a negative sort of way. “We have to be willing to take the training wheels off” means that we need to be willing to let the kids fail at their endeavors so as to truly learn to manage to succeed in the long run.

And not long ago, I discovered that my own understanding of how literal training wheels work was wrong. I had figured that the point of training wheels was merely to learn to pedal, and beyond that, there was little use except to give the kid the feeling of riding a bike “like big kids” where in reality the purpose was for the family to be able to go out on a walk, with the preschooler able to keep pace, on the training wheeled-bike, with the adults, rather than, if he was on foot, whining that he was too tired and mom and dad should slow down.

After all, that seems to be how everyone I see uses them.

But here’s what “Teaching Kids to Ride” has to say:

Most people that use training wheels have them adjusted incorrectly. The bike should always have a little bit of lean. If both training wheels can touch the ground at once, there is little weight on the bicycle’s rear wheel. This can reduce traction to zero. On uneven ground, the child may get stuck because the wheel spins. Even worse, the brake may become useless. When the bike is new, there should be only a small amount of tilt from one side to the other.

After the child has become accustomed to pedaling, steering and braking, the training wheels should be raised slightly, a bit at a time. It is probably better to do this without telling the child, who may object. The bike will become more and more tippy, and the child will learn to balance automatically with practice. As the child becomes more adept the bike will spend more and more time with both training wheels off the ground. The day will come when it is obvious that the training wheels are no longer doing anything, and they can be removed.

If the training wheels are left set on their lowest position, the bike is in effect an oversized tricycle, and some kids spend two or three years on training wheels as a result. This is not only a waste of their time, it is really quite dangerous as they learn to ride faster and faster, because of the poor cornering and braking of a training-wheel equipped bike.

Now, it seems to me that our apparent collective failure to understand how to use literal training wheels is not that different than the figurative training wheels we’ve created for teenagers and young adults. Teens have parents hovering over them to ensure that their homework is completed on time, and then (reportedly) insist that the school give them a pass if they blow an assignment. Those same parents micromanage the college application process, and (again, reportedly) (attempt to) intervene when they experience difficulties in college. And colleges offer their own training wheels, from free tutoring and tech support to the ways in which they’re prodded to make healthy eating choices and exercise regularly. After college, for increasingly many students, the training wheels stay on, as reports are that, among those who can afford it (and many who can’t, but don’t recognize the fact), they children continue to live at home or receive subsidies from Mom and Dad.

But if those training wheels don’t help the trainee progress, then there’s not much value in them — they only provide the appearance of progress.

Now, some training wheels we tend to get right. So far as I know, at least, American parents tend to let their kids stay at home alone for progressively longer periods, rather than keeping them under the watchful eyes of babysitters until they leave for college. Many states have instituted “training wheels” for driving, with restrictions on times of day and numbers of passengers being gradually lifted.

But, on the other hand, consider the university cafeteria. This is supposed to be “training wheel” stage of life. But, however much parents might have encouraged their offspring to get experience with cooking (my oldest is still at the mac & cheese-making stage; we still have to work on meat & vegetables), once they move on to college, they lose this experience entirely. What’s more, back in my day (yes, I know, I sound like an old lady), you were at least responsible for your own Sunday dinner and late night snacks. Now the trend seems to be to move to not just an all-you-can-eat format, but an unlimited “whenever you want to eat” format — not just at private universities like Marquette, but even at my (state school) alma mater!, where the cheapest option includes unlimited food from 7 am – 12 am, and works out to $25/day, assuming 15 weeks of classes plus finals. What’s more, the endless variety, and the emphasis on restaurant-quality meals, means that there’s not any reason to eat any meals elsewhere. Which means that, however much there might be all manner of signage encouraging students to watch what they eat, the training wheels are being left set on their lowest position, until the students leave campus and have them removed completely, know nothing about how to prepare healthy and economical meals for themselves, and the “grown-ups” moan that the kids are not prepared for the “real world.”

But, in the end, just as a balance bike works far better than training wheels, so, too, many of the metaphorical training wheels we’ve built, shouldn’t be used at all.

from flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/dottiemae/5393326849

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