IT'S A DAD'S LIFE: Adam Brophyon resisting the urge to tell them to be careful and instead cheering them on.
I'VE BEEN cycling round Dublin pretty much since I could ride a bike. I don't wear a helmet. This isn't smart and it isn't cool and it may even be illegal, but I'm never going to wear one.
This isn't a preening rebuttal to the system in an attempt to exercise my revolutionary psyche, I simply feel safe and comfortable on a bike and have no desire to change that.
At the age of 10, I got my first proper bicycle in a little shop in Booterstown. Two old men - well, they seemed ancient, but they were probably about 50 - populated the place. It was a LeJeune 10-speed, silver with blue and red stripes and drop handlebars.
Nothing up to that point had ever set my pulse fluttering like that bike. One of the wizened old geezers showed me how to change a tyre and the other chiselled our phone number into the metal at the bottom point of the frame - for security reasons apparently.
The workshop clanked and sparked: it was a medieval blacksmiths and my first steed was being shod.
They wheeled the bike out on to the footpath and there a little group, the two mechanics and the rest of my family, waved me off. Straight on to the Merrion Road in towards town. Nobody said: "Wait a minute, he's only 10, he can't manage a new bike on one of the busiest thoroughfares in the capital."
Nobody offered me a helmet.
I had one major right turn on the way home. It was a matter of pulling in and darting through the traffic when the gap arose, heart in mouth, then dashing for the house.
For the next month, whenever my dad needed a newspaper I was on hand to get it, each time from a different newsagent, each one further afield than the last. However, the memory that surfaces most prominently when I think of that bike is of when it became a chore, a passport for my parents to avoid dropping me anywhere.
I used to cycle to primary school and home again, then to swimming and home again. About 12 miles a day.
I remember the rain and my frozen hands, and I remember pulling in behind another bike on a long, straight road and matching its pedals, sluicing through the wet in sync with the other cyclist's rhythm.
Head down, stealing their slipstream in the face of the wind. When that happened and the machine moved sweetly, the distance was eaten. While pumping your legs with your head down to keep the rain sting from your eyes, things seemed to make sense at a time when there seemed to be very little sense to things.
It was mine, it brought me places and sometimes it brought me from places I didn't want to be. As with later couplings, my relationship with my bike did not reveal its true nature until the excitement had waned. It was at once a time machine, a way out, and at the same time a trudge, a beast of burden. The elder child can cycle now. We bought her a helmet with her first bike because I think the guy in the shop would have imploded if we hadn't. She has stopped wearing it though, and even though she has had falls, she hasn't decided to don it again.
She experienced her first downhill freewheel the other day, with an angled left turn at the bottom, her body at 45 degrees to the ground. I caught her rush of breath as she went by, the unrestrained glurp of glee at the swoop. Back she went for more.
I shut my eyes to the fear, resisted the urge to warn her to be careful, and cheered her on. She came out the other side flushed and gleaming. The younger followed on her trike at six miles per hour: "Look at me," she said. It was raining, and it was great.
I have noticed some press recently encouraging parents to forget the "hothousing" of kids and just let them be, to encourage them to fall out of trees and bash each other with sticks. I must have missed the whole hothousing era.
We haven't had ours tutored in Japanese or leadership skills, or played geometrical equations in their room at night. History is still last week to them as opposed to the Neolithic period.
I don't buy the line that parents are pre-preparing their kids to the detriment of their childhood experiences - we're Irish, not Californian. But I do quake at the idea of kids living under house arrest, consumed by Playstation because the street is more dangerous than Grand Theft Auto.
To quote the great Freddie Mercury, they should "get on their bikes and ride".