About 12 years ago, Kara (one of our friends) had just had a second child and was struggling with the adjustments required to bring a new kid into their home.  Their oldest son was a handful to say the least.  He was more than normally bright, and exceptionally energetic… a combination that often leads to trouble, and this kid was trouble in so many ways.  Kara had been having a hard enough time dealing with this fireball of destructive curiosity and energy, and adding another baby with the additional burdens of postpartum depression and general life difficulties only complicated matters.

In a moment of frustration Kara vented some of her self doubt to her doctor, wondering what she had done wrong with her oldest to make him so difficult to manage and how she was going to cope with another of the same breed.  The doctor, who had apparently been in practice some time, responded simply that she just needed to have another kid.  Kara was horrified.  However, the doctor continued his prescription by saying something along the lines of “By the time you have three kids, you realize none of it is your fault, they are all different, and came hard-wired like that in spite of anything you do to try to change it.”   In Kara’s case, her second son turned out to be a sensitive, quiet, and easy-going baby.  Her two boys definitely came from God distinctly pre-configured with personalities and characteristics of their own.   Yesterday, I got another piece of evidence to add to my collection in support of this theory.

I have satisfied the doctor’s prescription, and have three highly unique and wonderful children.  True to the doctor’s predictions, they came hard-wired to be very different from each other.  The most recent example revolves around learning to ride a bike.  I had spent some time this week getting Isaac’s bike fixed up for a mountain-biking trip with Scouts, and consequently had bikes on the brain when I found myself with a few unaccounted for minutes.  Looking around the garage, I saw Isaac’s old bike and realized I was overdue teaching Michael how to ride.  I aired up the tires, lubricated the chain and wheels, grabbed Michael’s helmet, and called him out to the front yard to start the potentially long and painful process of teaching him to ride.

When Sydney was learning to ride, she was overly cautious, afraid of everything, and would take a long time to get over a crash and be ready to go again.   It took months of refusing to give in to her pleas to re-install the training wheels to get her stable and pedaling on her own.  Even after she’d learned to ride, she would often crash in anticipation of a crash or freeze up and crash when something different happened anywhere near her.  Teaching her to ride was a slow and painful process.  To this day, I have difficulty getting her on a bike.

Isaac, on the other hand, was utterly fearless.  When we bought his first bike, he informed me he wanted me to take off the training wheels and that he could do it without me.  He was simply going to climb on the bike, start pedaling, and be an expert immediately (incidentally his approach to almost any physical activity).  I didn’t comply with that request right away, but it wasn’t long before he had his way.  He was overconfident.  Because of his over-confidence, his crashes were often somewhat catastrophic both physically and emotionally, requiring some time for him to recover his willingness to move on.  However, he universally recovered and it didn’t take long before he was tearing around the neighborhood at full speed every opportunity he had.

Given the wide differences between these two experiences, I was interested to find out how Michael would do.  Personality-wise, he falls somewhere between Sydney and Isaac.  He is fairly tender, crafty, and cuddly.  However, with a big brother like Isaac, he is also fairly hardy…  He learned early to recover from being knocked over (by Isaac, the dog, the goats, or just tripping on something out in the barn), and for the last six months of city life has been learning all kinds of physical skills at the “Ninja Park” gym where the workouts consist of things like climbing or jumping over and off of walls, walking on balance beams, and stuff like that.

When I told Michael he was going to learn to ride a bike, he was a little nervous at first, but excited at the same time.  Unlike Isaac, he asked for training wheels… I said no and he mostly accepted my answer in spite of being nervous.  He asked me to hold on tight as he straddled the bike, and I got him rolling with my hand on his back to steady him.  Almost immediately he was stable, and I lifted my hand off his back and he rode for about 20-30 feet on his own.  Balance wasn’t going to be a problem for this kid.

As promising a start as this was, we still had a ways to go.  Because Michael had essentially grown up on a farm where there were almost no paved surfaces, he had never had much experience pedaling tricycles, and the concept of pedaling forward didn’t resonate immediately.  He’d get going, get relatively stable, and push down on a pedal before it was over the top of the turn.  On my bike, that’s not a particular problem because the crank will just cycle backwards.  However, on Michael’s bike, that motion activates the breaks, and every few seconds he would come to an unexpected and screeching halt, followed by a crash.  I didn’t think I’d ever run into a scenario where balance and steering weren’t the problem, but pedaling forward was.  To Michael’s credit, though, every time he crashed he would dust himself off, grunt or growl like his dad often does when something frustrating like that happens, and get back on the bike.  Within about 15 minutes, we had made it to the park nearby and he was riding laps around the playground without my direct intervention.

This proved to be something of a challenge for me though… I was supposed to jog along beside him to keep him from any serious danger, but I had started the day with a 2.5 mile trail run with Liz, followed it with a 2 1/2 hour hike up the mountain with the boys, and now running for another 30 minutes along side of Michael was taking it’s toll — especially since I’m still not acclimated to the altitude here after spending months at sea-level.  I needed to quit, but Michael was having none of it.  I used the convenient excuse that we needed to show Mom the amazing progress he had made to convince him to head home.  It didn’t stick though… no sooner had he shown Mom his progress than he was adamant he needed more practice.  This time I figured he was doing well enough that I could get away with trailing him on my bike, and this adjustment made it possible for him to spend another hour riding around the park.  Before long he felt comfortable enough to ride the circuit while I sat on a park bench and enjoyed the beautiful spring afternoon.

Eventually Liz reminded me I needed to come home and clean up so I could take her out to see a live performance of “South Pacific” and take her to dinner.  Michael would have stayed longer, but you can’t argue with Mom when she’s planning on going out on a hot date.  All told, Michael spent less than two hours start-to-finish learning to ride a bike.   He never had training wheels, had little experience with pedal-driven equipment, and yet was by far the fastest learner of the three.  Three kids… three rounds teaching them to ride a bike… three totally different experiences driven by the highly distinct nature of the kid being taught.  I’m no expert in the broader world of kids, but I can say from many different experiences that my kids, at least, came hard-wired with certain traits and tendencies.