How to Teach Your Twins to Ride a Bike

Our girls are just now learning how to ride bicycles by themselves. It has been a fun (and exhausting) adventure. However, several skinned knees and a few tears later, they are getting the hang of riding their bikes independently. Here’s some tips to help as you train your twins to ride a bike.

When to Train

Since our twin girls had older brothers who loved riding bikes, they wanted to ride at an early age. They gradually moved from tricycles to scooters to bicycles with training wheels by the time they were 4 years old. You’ll need to see how your twins are at each step of the way to see if they are ready for the next phase of mastering a bicycle.

Challenges with Twin Bike Riding

Teaching your twins how to ride bicycles is tricky. You’ll find that both your twins want to ride the bike at the same time. Of course, that’s a problem because it’s hard to hold up and help just one of your children on a bike.

With two kids, they both want to ride at the same time. So it’s definitely important to take turns or have both parents help out during the training. We found that typically one parent was working or busy when the kids really wanted to ride. This made it necessary to have the kids take turns.

Timing of Bicycle Training

Now just as you may have discovered with potty training, one of your twins may be more ready for riding the bike earlier than the other. For our family, the girl who wanted to potty train first was the one a little slower to ride the bike. Of course, we started out with training wheels on both bikes and that enabled them to experiment in the driveway and on the sidewalk and the street in front of our house.

Baby Steps to Riding a Bike

We took off the training wheels and the pedals and we turned the bikes into kind of glider bikes, where they can glide on the bike, pick up their feet and learn how to balance.

After they mastered balancing, we put the pedals back on, and they’re able to pick up and just keep rolling from there. If you’re helping your twins learn how to ride a bike, be careful that there’s always someone there to help and support them. So either you’re going to have one of your kids without training wheels, and the other one with, or you’ve got two parents involved to help monitor them.

Biking Buddy System

One advantage of twins, once they are able to be self sufficient on their bike, is that they have a built in buddy. We like to send our kids out using the buddy system. You always have to be with your buddy and watch for your buddy. That way in case one of the buddies has an accident, or gets hurt, the other buddy can take care of them and come and get Mom and Dad to help as well.

Patience and Fun

If you remember when you learned to ride a bike, there were phases of fun, excitement, sheer terror, and pain. You’ll experience these again with your twins. Be patient. Demonstrate how things work and should be done. Don’t assume they know.

Before you know it, the whole family will be riding, and you’ll be off on a family bike ride.