Nice article. Are your kids still content to be passengers and not actually in control? My 4 year old twins are refusing the madsen and wanting to ride their own bikes. Which might be fine except for crazy narrow shoulders on busy roads and the fact it takes 2 hours to travel the 3 miles to school with them on their own bikes. Any advice from the guru-of-family-cycle-as-transportation?!
@Heather-- Hey there! Thanks for the compliment but I would never consider myself a guru of anything. I do understand how long it can take to have the boys ride their own bikes somewhere. We ride for two reasons-- transportation and recreation. When it comes to bicycling for recreation, which happens mostly on weekends, the boys ride themselves. This way we can take our time, mosey along, ride in the park with no true destination in mind, stop if they are tired, or if we are headed downtown, we let them ride on the less-busy sidewalks with less guilt. When it comes to bicycling for transportation, however, the grown-ups do the riding. Our city just does not have the infrastructure to make it plausible for them to ride to most places we need to go, like school, even though they are quite proficient on their bikes and distance doesn't seem to be too much of a problem.
I WELL understand stubborn kids. But perhaps if you give them their own bike riding time on weekends, maybe they'll go for you and your wife bicycling them for transportation during the week. If you were taking the car to school, they wouldn't be able to do the driving. Of course, reasoning with two four-year-olds is always a crap-shoot so....
And hey-- you have four kids so I suspect I have much to learn from you. Good luck & happy riding.
2 comments:
Nice article. Are your kids still content to be passengers and not actually in control? My 4 year old twins are refusing the madsen and wanting to ride their own bikes. Which might be fine except for crazy narrow shoulders on busy roads and the fact it takes 2 hours to travel the 3 miles to school with them on their own bikes. Any advice from the guru-of-family-cycle-as-transportation?!
@Heather-- Hey there! Thanks for the compliment but I would never consider myself a guru of anything. I do understand how long it can take to have the boys ride their own bikes somewhere. We ride for two reasons-- transportation and recreation. When it comes to bicycling for recreation, which happens mostly on weekends, the boys ride themselves. This way we can take our time, mosey along, ride in the park with no true destination in mind, stop if they are tired, or if we are headed downtown, we let them ride on the less-busy sidewalks with less guilt. When it comes to bicycling for transportation, however, the grown-ups do the riding. Our city just does not have the infrastructure to make it plausible for them to ride to most places we need to go, like school, even though they are quite proficient on their bikes and distance doesn't seem to be too much of a problem.
I WELL understand stubborn kids. But perhaps if you give them their own bike riding time on weekends, maybe they'll go for you and your wife bicycling them for transportation during the week. If you were taking the car to school, they wouldn't be able to do the driving. Of course, reasoning with two four-year-olds is always a crap-shoot so....
And hey-- you have four kids so I suspect I have much to learn from you. Good luck & happy riding.
Post a Comment