How to Use Science Fiction To Teach a 6-Year-Old to Ride a Bike

This past summer our middle child wanted to learn how to ride a bike. I honestly couldn’t remember how we taught our oldest daughter because I was 97 months pregnant and couldn’t waddle up the street fast enough to hear what terse words were being exchanged in frustration between her and her dad. But eventually she got it.

So I put Mr. Lindquist in charge of teaching this one, too. He began with instructions on how to fall safely. Good theory in concept. But for the child to whom most things come easily (reading, shoe tying, cartwheels, subtraction, monkey bars) her grit muscle doesn’t get a lot of exercise. She wasn’t hip to the idea of falling. A trip to the spacious church parking lot to practice resulted in tears. I could tell she was getting closer to being able to do it, but just couldn’t get over the mental hump of wanting to continue.

Enter me, making things up as I am wont to do.

I locked eyes with my blue-eyed baby girl and said something similar to the following.

“Gabby, the future you can already ride a bike. Right now you are on the left side of the timeline not knowing how. All the way over here on the right is Future Gabby who can ride a bike with no training wheels. You can’t just snap your fingers and become Future Gabby. You have to work your way there. By failing. By falling. Every time you try, you get a little bit closer to Future Gabby. So let’s keep going. I think you’ll become Future Gabby sooner than you think.”

(Just in case you couldn’t see how bad my drawing was above…)

While it may sound quite wacko, it worked. Assured that if she just kept practicing, she would eventually get there gave her the confidence and will to literally get back in the saddle over and over again. As Dory always said, just keep pedaling.

And what kind of a blog post would this be if I didn’t have video evidence?! Here’s a clip from one of her first parent-hands free rides. Since this was done in July, I had forgotten another one of my tactics until I uploaded it which was to sing to distract Gabby from thinking about falling. My lyrics are….unique! But feel free to listen with the sound off if you prefer your ears not bleed.

Not gonna lie, I was pretty darn proud of this atypical stroke of parenting genius. And wanting to capitalize on it to the fullest, I explained that now that she was riding a bike, Future Gabby moved further down the line. She was now somebody who could do more things than current Gabby like riding up and down hills on the bike and multiplication and still not getting a phone til you’re in high school.

This experience also made me reflect on my future -wait, can one reflect on one’s future? Whatever. Future Nicole is out there somewhere with the knowledge and life experiences that I am sometimes afraid to humbly admit I don’t have now. But I realized that if I tell my 6-year-old it’s OK to be a work in progress, I need to get comfortable with being one, too. As long as we keep failing forward and inching toward our future selves without worry, we’ll be better for it. Future Us will thank us….or something like that.