Yep. She has one as well as a bike with training wheels. She's not all that interested in either... Haha.
Since I've been working at home lately I've been taking her fishing once or twice a week and trying to hit a park or two as well.
Lose the one with the training wheels. Trust me on this, buddy.
To make a long story longer, a lot of the motorcycling crashes in the U.S. is caused by how we typically "teach" our children to operate bicycles when they are small.
To cause a vehicle with two inline wheels to turn, you push the bars in the OPPOSITE direction of the intended turn. To cause a vehicle with MORE than two wheels to turn, you push the steering in the SAME direction as the intended turn. These are opposites.
So what happens, is that if you have the training wheels all the way down, it's a four-wheeler, and it ALWAYS turns in the same direction as the turn- so you're basically teaching them the exact opposite of how a bicycle actually steers. Then, to add insult to injury, the parent "helps" the child by raising the training wheels a little bit, and all of the sudden, the steering reverses every time a training wheel lifts off the ground or touches down on the ground, switching back and forth from being a two-wheeler to being a three-wheeler, leaving the child completely confused. After removing the training wheels completely, the child usually figures out through trial and error, how to keep a bicycle upright, but they have no conscious idea of how they're doing it, and they've got a metric $#!+-ton of incorrect training baggage already stored in their little brain.
Children that learn on balance bikes, don't go through ANY of that- you put them on the bike, they dog-paddle, and it steers exactly like any other bicycle, 100% of the time.
The danger is, that when children grow up, they assume that simply because as a child they operated a bicycle with four wheels, a bicycle that alternated between three and two wheels, and a bicycle with two wheels, and were eventually able to subconsciously figure out how to keep a bicycle upright, that they "know" how to ride, when in reality they know LESS than nothing about riding.
That's why there are so many funny videos on the internet of people on motorcycles absolutely center-punching the one thing that they were desperately attempting to avoid. Under stress, they CONSCIOUSLY attempt to steer the motorcycle, reverting back to what they "learned" as a child, and every deliberate steering correction that they make in an attempt to AVOID a collision with a particular target, actually has the exact opposite effect, putting them back ON a collision course with what they are trying to avoid.
