Cycling with your family is a great thing to do. Clearly a lot of people find that is so: witness the number of families pedalling up and down the nearest railway trail of a weekend. For many non-cyclists, this is the only kind of cycling they do and for many cyclists it is one of the activities they find most rewarding. And so it should be.
At the opposite extreme, some over-keen racing cyclists just can’t be bothered with the kiddy phase at all! They’re really missing something and making a huge mistake. Leave it until they are “big enough to keep up” and likely they’ll be into something else.
Riding with your children, from the earliest possible age, is the best way to introduce them to cycling and pass all your knowledge and experience on to the next generation. If you’re a keenie those ridiculously short and slow rides full of stops for playgrounds and every field with animals may seem irksome, but “child-centred cycling” is well worth the sacrifice to your training regime. Just think, in years to come you’ll have the best of all riding partner(s) – people of your own flesh and blood to share all those great experiences that cycling can give. For now they’ll be little experiences of course, but try to see them though the eyes of your little ones they’ll look big enough!
The CTC Guide to Family Cycling by Dan Joyce, published in 2008, is currently available 
from bookshops. (ISBN no 978-0-9548176-4-0) Price £9.99
Seats and trailers
Family cycling begins by introducing your baby to the great outdoors. She’ll lie back in her specially adapted trailer (or child seat when a bit older) and gurgle at the clouds and trees swooping overhead – then promptly fall asleep. The motion of cycling is just as effective as a trip in the car for soothing a teething toddler to sleep - with added fresh air!
An infant is old enough for a child seat when she can sit up unsupported – like in the middle of the floor – and the journey should not be any longer between stops than the length of time she is happy to sit and play like that at home. Usually that’s about 9 months, but let physical development rather than age be your guide. Seats that have a reclining backrest get you started a bit sooner and are in any case much better, since your little one will nod off sooner or later and a recliner supports their head rather than letting it nod forwards. It’s okay to use a reclining seat as soon as the little ’un can sit with back support only – e.g. in the middle of the sofa without tipping sideways. That’s usually 6 months but don’t just go by age. A car seat in a trailer, or a special baby insert available for some trailers (that allow an older child also to sit alongside) may be usable with a newborn babe. (This advice differs from what you’ll read on some American-influenced websites, since in Europe cycling is not mere recreation but essential transport. Accordingly we have the motivation and advocate the means to keep mobile at all stages of life.)
As he grows the childseat (or trailer) passenger becomes fascinated by the passing scene, which at cycling speed, as you know, passes fast enough to be exciting and yet slow enough to take it all in. And if you spot anything especially interesting, on a bike you can always stop and investigate. With a youngster in tow, you must make those stops - in response to demands from behind. Nothing could be better calculated to put a child off cycling than to be continuously whisked past all the stuff he finds most interesting. Do that in the car instead, and make the bike his passport to cool stuff like village playgrounds, woods to explore and horses to stroke over a gate. Remember: family cycling is child-centred cycling.
Guided pedalling
About age 4, give or take a year, just sitting in a seat will get boring and she’ll want to pedal: not only because it’s the grown-up thing to do but also to keep warm. (Remember when you’re sweating with the extra load, junior may be slowly freezing; and whereas a hot kid gets noisy, when cold they just go deadly quiet!) Child-back tandems are the best. Adapted adult tandems (with kiddycranks) come a close second and trailer-cycles third. Some cheap trailer cycles are appallingly made however, so in some cases that’s a very distant third. Then in fourth we even have devices for hitching on an actual kid’s bike, trailer-cycle style.
All these devices introduce kids to proper cycling, but under complete control of the adult “pilot”. They learn a lot about changing gear, braking, how to position themselves on or off the road and can play their part by doing the hand signals – provided they know their left and right! At first the distance she can safely sit on a saddle will be less than what you had built up to with the childseat – where it doesn’t matter so much when she becomes a bit drowsy. Another set-back can be expected at the transition from guided pedalling to solo riding. You’ve just got to accept that progress is by two-steps forward and occasionally one back.
Going solo
Those first trips on his own little bike will not exactly be solo of course, with mother hen and probably father hen too, in close attendance. It’s best with kiddie in the middle, but if only one parent is available one should follow rather than lead. Follow close and a bit to the offside, so you shelter him from traffic, can see all that he does, can come alongside whenever conditions allow or demand (e.g. at junctions), then drop back, or quickly move forward, brake and block in case he runs out of control toward a hazard. (Better he runs into you at low speed than something more solid at high speed!) Give clear instructions from your rear position, tell him all the things you would be looking out for and doing, as if you were in his place. It’s also good for his motivation to be slightly in front, rather than doggedly following a parent’s lead.
As the children grow up there will be more advanced skills and intuitions for you to pass on, so keep up the flow of information. Tell them why you give parked cars a wider berth when there are people inside, what those white lights on the back mean, why you’re dropping into single file on a right-hand bend but stay double when the road swings left, why you never ride over the end of a stick (you’ll come to a sticky end!) …
Where to ride
It’s obvious that rail trails and the Sustrans network generally is a safe bet for family cycling. But it’s debatable to what extremes you should go to avoid traffic. If mountain-biking is your bag it will be tempting to just pop a childseat on the hardtail and hit your favourite trails. But consider the hammering to which a kid is subjected in one of these seats on anything short of the smoothest gravel. She cannot use her legs as suspension and just sits and is jolted along the short length of her tender spine. Some kids find the bumping fun – at least at first – but others will vociferously object and it surely cannot do any of them much good. It is for this reason that American helmet manufacturers have withdrawn from the tinies end of the market. You’ll not find anything to fit an average 9-month-old and it’s because they don’t want to be associated with shaken baby syndrome. So at least with younger children in seats, stick to smooth roads and the well-beaten path, preferably avoiding the rougher parts of the Sustrans network too.
Once they are going solo, to avoid motor traffic becomes even more desirable and roughstuff less of a comfort problem. It brings other challenges and dangers instead. Remember that kids can be put off badly if cycling involves too much pushing up hills and over obstacles, or dragging a heavy bike through mud, so pick out easy routes whether on or off-road.
Ultimately however, roads must be dealt with and here is where family cycling really makes a difference. Most teenagers have bikes and they are that teenager’s only private means of reasonably rapid transport. Regardless of what the parents say these teenagers will ride on roads, even busy roads, if those provide the most expedient route from A to B – and usually they do. But most parents nowadays do not cycle. What cycling skills they might have had are rusty, redundant and not passed on to their kids.
Your kids, however, come from a cycling family. Unlike most kids, yours should already have ridden hundreds, maybe thousands of miles on roads under the close, one to one supervision of a skilled and experienced adult. No training course can equal that. Key survival skills that some kids may have practised a couple of times are already second-nature to yours.
So get out there as a family, on roads, even moderately busy roads. Like it or not, your kids will ride in places like that one day on their own, so give them some practice and pass on all the skills you have.
When and with whom to ride
Try not to force a reluctant child to go out cycling. Discuss your plans a few days ahead, involve the kids in the planning, engage their interest in the places you could visit. Don’t just drag them round the usual clubrun of boring old people and few stops – not unless they’re young enough to enjoy the fuss the old dears make of them or unless the chocolate cake at the café is encouragement enough.
Remember that phrase: “child centred cycling”. This is about family cycling rather than tacking the family onto the cycling you would do anyway. So: if you also want a bit of adult company, for goodness sake find some more families!
Especially given the current state of British society, youngsters need the reassurance they can only get from meeting other youngsters who also cycle, that cycling is not this weird thing that only their weird family does. No local CTC family section? Start one. It’s a lot of commitment, but worth it. Talk to other parents at playgroup (a bit late if you leave it until schooldays). Some probably want to go cycling with their kids but don’t know exactly how. With your CTC contacts you can help them get organised and get yourselves some cycling companions for local rides and maybe even holidays too.
One of the best things CTC does for family cycling is to organise rallies. The Birthday Rides and New Forest Week each provide a whole week of rides including short ones for families. Riding each day all day together, plus social events in the evenings, gives kids and parents alike time to really get to know one another. These events, including shorter weekend events such as York and the Home Counties Rallies provide opportunities to exchange information, outgrown kiddy cycling equipment, and to confirm that we are not alone! Similar events, associated with if not directly organised by CTC, include the Mildenhall, Market Bosworth and Tandem Club Rallies.
Growing a cyclist
You cannot force a young person to become a cyclist, only encourage. From an early age and especially as they get older, your kids must be allowed to choose not to cycle even if that means one parent missing their weekly ride. By all means make the stay-at-home alternative seem relatively boring: “oh that’s okay, you can help me with this little job”. In which case they probably will choose cycling. Reluctance to get out of a morning is often nothing more than cold feet. They generally enjoy it once they’re up and at it.
Be sensitive to peer pressure. As the teens approach they may not want to be seen in funny cycling clothes in the company of their strange cycling parents by any other kid from their school or wider social circle. Reluctance to ride may be curable simply by varying your route to avoid the school catchment, riding separately until past it, a change of clothes, or starting even earlier!
Remember that they have youth on their side and that whereas you may need to ride hard every week to avoid going backwards, they really don’t. As a teenager they’ll lose little fitness despite a gap of a month or more, and when they do get back into it again they’ll advance in leaps and bounds. A few rides and it could be you who struggles to keep up!
Growing a new person is very much like tending a vine. There are times when a lot of training is needed, others when you must let it alone. Too much attention stunts growth, too little results in a rampant mess and no fruit. No one ever said it was easy, but get it near enough right and you can look forward to some great cycling in the best of all company.
Chris Juden - 2004-07-28
