Pearls: No training wheels needed

EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl

It’s one of life’s questions, one for which I have never heard a completely satisfactory answer:

Are training wheels the best way to learn to ride a bicycle?

We may never really know.

I didn’t learn to ride using them. My first bike was your standard pedal-braking, single-geared machine that had transported elementary schoolers up and down sidewalks for generations. Not a training wheel in sight.

When it was time to learn to ride, my folks took us out to an area of the yard that had an easy slope. Dad positioned us at the highest point, helped us steer forward, and rolled us through the grass. My sister and I fell a few times, got up, went again, and were driving on pavement before we knew it.

I taught my boys the same basic way. The bike that the older two learned to ride had training wheels, but I removed them at some point, because I didn’t see that they were really learning much with the extra supports attached. The youngest boy learned without them entirely.

Now little girl wants a bike, and says she wants training wheels – a request I believe is more about style than about function. I expect to take the trainers off and teach her to ride in similar fashion to the boys at some point.

So in my family, I guess the verdict is somewhat anti-training wheels. I’m not saying that the extra wheels don’t work, or that you’re wrong if you believe in them. They just haven’t been our best path to learning how to ride.

And why is that? I think I might finally have an answer to that question. It’s because as long as we have those wheels, we lean on them; if those wheels are gone, we learn to rely upon blance and the two wheels we do have to ride.

I watched my kids when the first bike had the training wheels attached: they leaned right, and they leaned left – there were three wheels always touching the ground, counting the front, the back and whichever side’s training wheel was being favored.

Those kids ween’t riding on the two big wheels and letting the training wheels catch their mistakes: they were relying upon one trainer or the other all the time. Is there a life lesson there? I think so.

No, I’m not going to weary you with the arguments about our social safety net or anything like that. Life is not a bike ride, and we all find ourselves needing help from time to time. But in terms of the choices we make, the rides we elect to ride, we often will rely upon the mechanisms in place that will save us from certain of life’s risks.

But when we embrace the risk and learn to balance our lives, we find ourselves riding along with confidence – and eventually, even with speed.

Now, I don’t mean the foolish risks, the unnecessary gambles that put ourselves and others needlessly in harm’s way. I’m talking about asking a girl for a date, or interviewing for a job, or appropriately standing up for yourself. It takes courage to reach a goal.

Think about it. In the business world, imagine you need to ask your boss for a raise. Would you take your mother with you? Of course not, because that’s support that you have presumably outgrown in the professional setting.

Bike riders don’t use training wheels; and if those wheels are still attached to your two-wheeler, are you really a bike rider? No. They’re a teaching tool, but we learn not to lean upon them beyond that instructional period.

It just takes an afternoon and a grassy hill – we face our fears, gain our balance and learn to ride. And what’s more, the same principle can take us to our goals in adulthood as well. The journey begins when the training wheels disappear.

Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.