This helmet thing.

[kwackers]

My son was just over 2 when he learned to ride. His little friend next door was 3 and his dad was outside teaching him to ride so he wanted a go.
He took to it like a duck to water, after a couple of wobbly starts he was riding up and down like an old hand.

The good thing about young kids is they don't realise that they can't do it and so just get on with it.

[Vorpal]

Great movie!
I've found it on YouTube and will send the link to Daughter1. Her son (our grandson of course) is having a great deal of difficulty learning to ride. He's a stubborn little lad of six in January. It doesn't help that his father never ever ever learned to ride a bike. He never wanted to and saw no reason to, so that attitude has percolated down to his son. He has enough difficulty just turning pedals, let alone steering. Stabilisers and pushing him along are the only way at the moment.

I'm trying to get him interested, but it's an uphill struggle. If he can see a two year old girl conquering two wheels, it MAY work. My fingers are crossed.

My son didn't learn until he was almost 6. He was happy pedalling on the back of the tandem, and uninterested in either the balance bike, or his own bike. Then suddenly in March, he asked about it, we took his bike up to the school playground, and he got it pretty much right away. He still needs the occasional push to get started, but he has ridden on his own bike up to 5 miles, now. He's still a bit unsteady, but he went from uninterested to enthusiastic practically overnight Maybe it was just his friends doing it.

[pjclinch]

I'm trying to get him interested, but it's an uphill struggle.

I know it's a figure of speech, but seriously, make it a downhill struggle. I teach new riders (adults and children) on a gentle downhill with a benign runout (i.e., if they let it run they'll eventually just come to a halt rather than crash in to something) so that gravity can do the propulsion. That way they can concentrate on the difficult bit, the steering. And the key to that is usually looking where you want to go, as opposed to at what you're doing. Once they're doing steering on a freewheel the pedalling tends to be trivial.

This is my usual teaching spot for 1st timers:
https://goo.gl/maps/XcTDs1kB15N2

(that does have a hill, going down away from the viewpoint, levelling out before the end)

Pete.

[Mick F]

Both our daughters were three(?) when they made it on to two wheels, but at least they'd had tricycles before that.

One house we lived in had the hall, livingroom, dining room and kitchen all on a "circuit" if you left the doors wide open. Daughter1 would delight in riding her little Triang trike round and round and round and round.................

Where our grandson lives is flat. They have a long and wide drive and I've been up and back with him endlessly. I really need to get him to the top of Gunnislake Hill, sit him on his bike, and let him go!

Actually, he'd much rather be inside building stuff with Lego. Convincing him of the enjoyment of exercise and cycling, is the uphill struggle.

[bigjim]

My two year old grandson was bought a balance bike at 15 months. It was a little to big for him kids but don't seem to bother about such trivilialities. He now flies around the house on it and also on the rare occassion, weather permitting, in the local park. He is three this month and has just started to outgrow it so a pedal bike will be the birthday gift.
Years ago I remember reading somewhere that the best way to teach bike riding is to take the pedals off the bike and just scoot along until balance is mastered. Pedalling is then no problem.

[drossall]

And if the club had younger members to which they were trying to set an example - are you going to undermine that?

This is the sort of confusion into which you will always get if you assume that the people debating with you secretly agree with you

In fact, those people do not agree that helmets are necessary, and so the question is meaningless. Rather, we believe (having looked at the evidence) that they do not make nearly as much difference as most people, including you, assume, and indeed may be counter-productive. So there's not really much concern about undermining examples, except, from our perspective, those of unthinking adherence to a rather pointless social norm.

This of course is why the British Cycling spokesman, Chris Boardman, says that helmets are not even in the top ten things to be done for cycling safety. BC member clubs should perhaps take this on board.

But I still wouldn't ride helmetless with a club that required helmets, because I have no desire to go where I am not welcome.

[rmurphy195]

And if the club had younger members to which they were trying to set an example - are you going to undermine that?

This is the sort of confusion into which you will always get if you assume that the people debating with you secretly agree with you

In fact, those people do not agree that helmets are necessary, and so the question is meaningless. Rather, we believe (having looked at the evidence) that they do not make nearly as much difference as most people, including you, assume, and indeed may be counter-productive. So there's not really much concern about undermining examples, except, from our perspective, those of unthinking adherence to a rather pointless social norm.

This of course is why the British Cycling spokesman, Chris Boardman, says that helmets are not even in the top ten things to be done for cycling safety. BC member clubs should perhaps take this on board.

But I still wouldn't ride helmetless with a club that required helmets, because I have no desire to go where I am not welcome.

Statistics statistics - here's one for you.
I started wearing a helmet when my children were younger, to set an example. Thier friends and cousins in turn copied them.
Out of the five of us 3 have escaped head injuries due to wearing a helmet. 2 have not - but they haven't been involved in accidents.
None of the accidents occurred when not wearing a helmet.

[Mike Sales]

Statistics statistics - here's one for you.
I started wearing a helmet when my children were younger, to set an example. Thier friends and cousins in turn copied them.
Out of the five of us 3 have escaped head injuries due to wearing a helmet. 2 have not - but they haven't been involved in accidents.
None of the accidents occurred when not wearing a helmet.

That is not a statistic, it's a confused anecdote.

[beardy]

And if the club had younger members to which they were trying to set an example - are you going to undermine that?

This is the sort of confusion into which you will always get if you assume that the people debating with you secretly agree with you

In fact, those people do not agree that helmets are necessary, and so the question is meaningless. Rather, we believe (having looked at the evidence) that they do not make nearly as much difference as most people, including you, assume, and indeed may be counter-productive. So there's not really much concern about undermining examples, except, from our perspective, those of unthinking adherence to a rather pointless social norm.

This of course is why the British Cycling spokesman, Chris Boardman, says that helmets are not even in the top ten things to be done for cycling safety. BC member clubs should perhaps take this on board.

But I still wouldn't ride helmetless with a club that required helmets, because I have no desire to go where I am not welcome.

Statistics statistics - here's one for you.
I started wearing a helmet when my children were younger, to set an example. Thier friends and cousins in turn copied them.
Out of the five of us 3 have escaped head injuries due to wearing a helmet. 2 have not - but they haven't been involved in accidents.
None of the accidents occurred when not wearing a helmet.

That just shows how dangerous helmets are! Those of us who go around without them (lets include half of the Dutch nation here) just dont have a 60% head injury rate. Nowhere near that high.

[[XAP]Bob]

Define head injury - did you repeat each crash to test what injury might have been sustained?

[PhilWhitehurst]

Helmet use leads to a 60% head injury rate and are now banned.

[drossall]

I don't understand how you know that you escaped head injury. I've had plenty of accidents, including one when I fell off a bike years before helmets existed, and banged my head. I got sent to hospital to be checked for concussion, but was actually unscratched. I could have had the same accident with a helmet that had no effect, and exactly the same outcome. It would have been dented quite badly. People would have told me that my helmet had saved me, but plainly my skull was able to do that.

I really don't see how, given that we only ever have accidents with or without helmets, and not both, we can tell what the effect of the helmet (or non-helmet!) was.

What I do know is that the national trends don't seem to be affected by the introduction of helmets. If your figures of a massive benefit were repeated across the whole population, we couldn't possibly miss it.

In that sense, it's your very statistics that undermine your case - if you were right, we'd only need to glance at the national figures to spot it.

[kwackers]

Helmets are stupidly effective.
I've lost count of the number of folk that I know either directly or just one 'degree of freedom' away who've been saved by one.
Given how few cyclists I actually know I project that in the last 20 years or so helmets have saved the lives of around 10% of all cyclists on the roads!

This is staggering stuff. If you estimate that perhaps just 1 in 100 folk are cyclists that means there are 6 million out there and 600,000 or around 30,000 a year have their lives saved by helmets!
Thanks to helmets that number is reduced to nearer 100 - and to be fair most of that 100 wouldn't have been saved since they were run over by lorries which can only mean the efficacy of helmets is even greater than it first appears!

You can say what you want but based on some simple arithmetic and anecdotal evidence it's more than a little obvious that helmets not only work but they're an absolute necessity.

600,000 people agree with me.

[PhilWhitehurst]

Saved from what exactly and how do you know this?

[Bicycler]

Saved from what exactly and how do you know this?

Kwackers is pointing out that the vast majority of "helmet saved my life" anecdotes simply cannot be accurate.