What Cycling Can Teach Your Children

I have no children and don't plan on having any.  Still, I sometimes look at one thing or another and wonder what children or young adults might learn from it.  Perhaps that is a consequence of my being an educator.

(By the way, it's also one of the reasons why I find the Trump presidential campaign so abhorrent.  How can you teach your kids about honesty, respect and just plain good behavior, when someone like The Donald is one of the wealthiest people in the world and might become the most powerful?)

Anyway, I would like to think that if I had kids, they would learn a lot of good things from seeing me ride to work, and for pleasure.  I am sure that there are kids who are learning all sorts of great lessons from parents who ride bikes.    One might be simply that you're never "too old" to ride a bike.  Another is that you can have fun while doing (or getting to) the things you have and need to do.

From Kidical Mass Rockville

The author of the Bike to Work Blog once wrote about the "5 Things Your Bike Commute Teaches Your Children".  I might have come up with numbers 1,2, 3 and 5, or things like them.  But I'm not sure that I would have come up with number 4 unless I'd had kids.

Anyway, here they are:

1. Think outside the box. Riding bike to work is powerful because so few others are doing it. When you bike to work, you are teaching your children that there is more than one way to do something–even something as mundane as the daily commute. In a world in which the jobs your kids will have haven’t been created yet, the ability to “Think Different” is a powerful key to success.
2.  Be Frugal. We try to teach our children to understand value, thrift, and priorities but the average American family spends more on transportation than on food. For most of us, that means a car that sits in an expensive garage all night and in an expensive parking spot all day. By not spending a lot of money on a car, I am powerfully teaching my children what I value.
3. Be Active. We tell our children to eat right and be active (“go out and play!”), but we gain five to eight pounds each year. Many of us exercise before the kids get up or after they go to bed and they don’t see it. When you ride a bike your kids see you leave and come home under your own power; they know you value exercise and a healthy, active body.
4. Be Proactive and Self-Reliant. We want our children to anticipate problems and opportunities and we strive to empower them. When my daughter once asked why I was a little late getting home, I told her that that I had a flat tire. She seemed surprised and asked how I got home; I responded that I had “fixed it.” Watching her face as she processed the lesson that such a thing was fixable was priceless.
5. Tread Lightly. Regardless of your views on climate change, the excesses of the 20th century have to be recognized as unsustainable. I don’t consider myself to be a tree-hugger, but I want my children to recognize that we must consume less and think more. By choosing a bicycle over a car, I am demonstrating an awareness of my impact on the planet that I know my children are absorbing.

In The Family

Got up late this morning to more rain.  Still felt sleepy throughout the day.  I have an excuse:  lack of REMs during the past three days.  Hopefully, I'll feel better and will be on my bike tomorrow.


I was just "flipping" through some photos I took.  Nobody'll confuse my work with that of Henri-Cartier Bresson, but I have a couple of pictures I like.  Here's one I took a couple of weeks ago when I was riding on the Rockaway Boardwalk:

It was interesting to see the two boys with their mother.  A woman I knew--a former co-worker--who used to live out that way sometimes rode with her daughters along that boardwalk.  I accompanied them a couple of times; I enjoyed the company of the mother and her daughters.  And, they turned out to be better cyclists than I'd anticipated.  


I can recall a few other times when I've seen mothers riding with daughters, or with their husbands and kids. However, I don't think I've ever seen a woman cycling with her boys, but not her husband or daughters, if she had them.  On the other hand, when I've seen boys on tricycles or bicycles with training wheels, the adult who was watching over them was a female--usually the mother, from what I could tell.  I've seen fathers or other adult males riding with young boys, but never accompanying or supervising them as the woman in the photo did.  


As I remember, my mother and grandmother took me to the park or watched over me as I toddered along the sidewalks in our neighborhood.  Those memories are sunny.  That's most likely because we went out only on nice days.


But neither they nor my father, or any other relatives, rode with me--at least as best as I can recall.  To be fair, almost no adults rode bikes in those days, at least in the US.  And, as I now realize, my parents may not have had enough money to buy bikes for themselves.  After all, the bikes I rode as a kid were gifts or hand-me-downs.  Worst of all, they were very busy, and thus very tired, so much of the time.


How involved were your family members in your childhood and adolescent cycling experiences?