FirstBIKE vs Strider Comparison Chart

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Balance bikes with foot rests: hot or not?

We're not crazy about foot rests on balance bikes. Children learn to balance more successfully when they put their feet down as stabilizers whenever they need to. This instills confidence and puts them in control of [not] falling down. This is also partly why [for tots] a bike with pedals needs to have training wheels- because the pedals are in the way of using their feet for stability. So it stands to reason that giving kids a platform to rest their feet is counter-productive, though we recognize it as a feature that pays dividends when kids are rolling down looooong gradual hills (which hopefully aren't steep and which do not cross other streets!) Even so, foot pegs welded to a balance bike's frame defeat the purpose of removing the pedals in the first place- which is to get them out of the way and uncomplicate the learning process!

We have also observed that certain brands of balance bike which feature a foot rest can potentially injure a child because as children push off the ground to gain speed, sometimes their feet hit and get tangled with the foot rests. This is not so much a problem with the wildly popular KaZaM as it is with others on the market which have a welded tube added underneath the frame.

Bottom line: Foot rests are not a deal maker or breaker when it comes to balance bikes. Top of the line LikeaBIKEs do not even offer them here in the US. Neither do the all-new FirstBIKE or the FUJI Rookie. It's just a gimmicky feature that doesn't add any real value to the learning process and which could potentially cause a lot of painful bruises on a child's ankles.