Eric Awwy

Hi — I'm Eric, the founder of KiddingZone, and if you're here it's probably because you're staring at a screen full of conflicting bike reviews, wondering which one is actually worth your money. I've been there. Twice.

When my eldest, Zara, turned two, I was convinced I was buying the perfect balance bike. I'd done my homework — or so I thought. Forty minutes of Googling, one YouTube video, and a brand name I recognised from an Instagram ad later, I ordered something that looked the part. It arrived in a box roughly the size of a wardrobe, weighed more than Zara herself, and she refused to go near it. It sat in the hallway for eight months before I accepted defeat.

That mistake cost me £120 and a lot of parental confidence. What it gave me, though, was a problem I couldn't let go of: why is it so hard to find honest, experience-backed advice about kids' bikes? The category is enormous — balance bikes, pedal bikes, helmets, trailers, cargo setups — and yet almost everything written about it reads like a press release. Sponsored. Vague. Oddly cheerful about mediocre products.

So I started keeping notes. I borrowed bikes from friends, bought a few, returned a few more. I became the person in our neighbourhood who always had a different bike leaning against the fence on a Saturday morning, with a child on it and a stopwatch in my pocket. Zara was in on it. When our second, Kobi, came along and hit his first riding age, the testing accelerated. We built a little crew — school-run families, a couple of cycling-mad dads from the park, a physiotherapist friend who helped me think about fit and posture properly.

KiddingZone launched from those notes. The name came from Zara, who was five at the time and announced that our garden was "the kidding zone" because we were always testing things. I kept it. It felt right — playful, but purposeful.

Nine years on, we've now tested over 180 bikes and gear products, all with real kids in real conditions. We buy most of what we test. We accept some press samples — and when we do, we say so clearly. We never accept payment for a positive review, and we never will. Our income comes from affiliate commissions when you buy through our links, which means we're incentivised to recommend things people actually want to buy — not things companies want us to push.

The goal is simple: help you spend less time researching and more time riding with your kids. Because I've seen what the right bike at the right age does to a child — the way it unlocks something, turns them into someone who wants to be outside, who races ahead and waits at the corner and turns back with a grin that hasn't changed since they were two. That's worth getting right.

If you've got a question about a specific bike or age group, the size finder is the fastest way to start. Or just drop us a message — we read everything.