Explore the Great Indoors
Tue, January 5, 2021 
When toy manufacturer Fisher Price introduced a stationary bike for kids, 3 to 6 years old, my first reaction was, “Does this mean children have abandoned the Great Outdoors completely?” There are those who will argue that some children live in apartments with nowhere to play outside, so it it better to at least get some exercise indoors. I cannot argue with that.
But exercise for a child is not just physical, the mental aspect is tremendously important. A child’s imagination is pure creativity. It is through games, imaginary situations, a child’s mind develops in preparation for a life ahead.
A real bicycle, or tricycle is often a child’s first taste of independence, and freedom. A chance to venture forth alone and unsupervised, if only to the end of the street. With a group of children, a bicycle becomes a horse to play cowboys and Indians Indigenous People, or a car to play cops and robbers.
Before the bicycle was invented, I am sure children used a broom or a stick to represent the horse, but the games were similar. Games that involve chasing each other, friendly competition. However, a stationary bike is already a pretend bicycle, so a pretend bike can hardly become a pretend horse. And how do you chase someone on a stationary bike?
To me the other thing this stationary bike represents is the ‘Fear Factor.’ It has completely taken over our way of life, and that is the real reason children no longer play outside. When I was a kid my mother told me, “Look both ways before crossing the road, and don’t talk to strangers.” Then she sent me out to play, and I was not expected home until it got dark.
I believe there have always been child predators and other dangers, but the problem is television and the media in general constantly dwelling on the negative, people are in perpetuity made aware of the dangers.
The actual danger becomes blown out of all proportion. It has even reached the stage where in some areas, parents who allow their children to walk to school unsupervised, are charged with neglect.
When 9/11 happened, people were fond of saying, “If we allow ourselves to live in fear, the terrorists have won.” However, the ‘Fear’ had crept into our lives long before 9/11. I believe it goes back to the 1960s, about the time of the Manson murders, when everything changed.
Prior to that people left their doors unlocked at night, teenage kids climbed into cars with strangers, as they hitch-hiked across the country. After Manson, doors were locked, and people stopped picking up hitchhikers. The “Bad Guys” had won. Long before there were Terrorists.
Today they have classes in High School to teach Social Skills. Social skills should be learned in pre-school, playing with other kids. It is where a child learns to share, and to fit in with others. Bullying is rife in schools, because kids have spent their early years with mommy, and are suddenly thrown in with a mix of other children, with no clue how to deal with the situation.
Whether a stationary bike for kids is a good or bad thing is a matter of individual opinion. To me it symbolizes the isolation that our children suffer from an early age. Pre-school should be the years to start learning social skills by playing, (Preferably unsupervised) with other kids.
School years are for book learning and strengthening social skills. By High School and into the teen years the individual should be honing social skills and learning how meaningful relationships work. However, if a child is a misfit from an early age, one who finds it difficult to socialize with others it will be a burden he or she will carry the rest of their life.
Social skills cannot be learned from a book, only by experience. Real experiences like riding a real bicycle.
To Share click "Share Article" below
Reader Comments (3)
I agree that the stationary child's bicycle is a sad icon of life in the 21st century.
I hate linking to the Daily Mail, but this article from 2007 is interesting: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-462091/How-children-lost-right-roam-generations.html
It shows how in four generations, the children in one family went from roaming miles from home to not leaving the garden.
Unreasonable fear is one factor. At least where I live, though, another factor is that settlement patterns are shifting. When I grew up in a new suburban subdivision in the 1970s, there were many children my age to play with, and our mothers (and yes, most kids had stay-at-home mothers) would let us roam all over the place. The houses in the neighborhood had been built around the same time and purchased by young couples, so there was a critical mass of kids from toddler to high school. Where I live now, by contrast, there are few children, so my neighbors who do have children drive them to play dates with their friends. Even if there weren't an exaggerated fear of stranger danger, I still think roaming ranges and patterns would be different now. I'm sure some sociologist has studied the effect of children's population density on play patterns. If not, it would be an interesting project.
I have seen this in two ways. Ask kids to draw a map of 'where they live and play'. It used to be that city kids would basically draw their house, school, and maybe a local park so usually less than a 1 mile radius. While kids from rural areas would also include those features, but the distances might be 5 or 10 miles.
As a child my world was about 1/2 mile radius, then I went to another school and it became about 1.5 mi radius.
And then I got a real bike and it became 25-40 mi radius.
In the US bikes were recreational post-WWII and we yearned to learn to drive because we knew that would push our radius out further than we could cover on our bikes.
Today kids are not allowed to roam and as a result they have no real desire to reach further and no desire to drive these days and no desire to own cars.
One of the best things if my childhood was the freedom I and the other kids had to roam. Most summer days I was out of the house by 9 a.m., riding my Schwinn Sting-Ray to the baseball diamond. After the morning game and a quick stop at home for lunch, we’d often meet up and ride around town on our bikes, exploring things. If I got back home much before dinner, Mom would ask if I was OK. We were expected to be independent.