Kids Can’t Fly with Training Wheels

By Mark W.F. Condon, Unite for Literacy vice president

Putting training wheels on a child’s bike has become a passé way to teach them to learn to ride. Rather, balance bikes—bicycles without pedals that kids push with their feet and glide along on—are much more effective because they teach kids how to balance more quickly. It takes a typical kid about an hour to teach themself (yes, all alone) how to balance on a bicycle from a seat that allows their feet to touch the ground without the added complication of having to pedal. Once they master balance, pedals can be added and kids rapidly discover the freedom that comes with bicycling.

So, why don’t training wheels work? It’s because they basically change a bicycle into a tall, wobbly tricycle devoid of a low center of gravity, making it easy for a beginning rider to fall over or crash land. Also, for that same reason, a child on training wheels who goes around a corner on their bicycle can’t lean into it, which is one of the sheer joys of riding a bicycle in the first place—that leaning, swooping motion that makes bike riding feel like unfettered flying!

In the literacy world, phonetically regular books—those with titles like “Nat the Fat Cat” and “Al and Sally are Pals”—are the equivalent of training wheels for reading. And literacy training wheels, are a hindrance, not a help, when kids are learning to read.

While the titles are cute, their content gives beginning readers an unbalanced introduction to books. Basically, books that are written based on common phonics rules, to ensure that every word is easy to decode, ultimately result in confusion and frustration. The language is stilted—unlike anything kids hear in their daily lives—requiring them to abandon the richness of their own oral language, which simply doesn’t map well onto the language of those books. The resulting content of these types of books is simplistic and fails to captivate children’s imaginations or help teach them to love books and reading. While those texts use phonetically regular vocabulary to teach kids basic skills, it doesn’t serve them well when they move into other books where they will find a rich variety of mostly phonetically irregular words.

Having a passion for books and reading invites children to experience the utter joy of folding themselves into a story or subject to which they can relate. They are then overjoyed when invited into the treasure houses of libraries and bookstores where they can discover an endless supply of such wonders, filled with natural language.

Sure, children need help learning to read and to ride a bike. They need to see adults doing both. They need to get answers to key questions like: “How do I keep from falling over?” and “Why do the letters in this word say that?” But twisting the magic of cycling and the joy of reading into something cute and simple can diminish children’s motivation for wanting to learn either one. Conversely, when we teach children to do something that they really, really care about—even if it’s hard—we give them wings.

Let’s teach new readers to fly!