Katharine Mieszkowski

Tuesday, Dec 2, 2008 11:21 AM UTC

Luxury gifts for kids

Learning to ride a bike sure has come a long way from ye olde training wheels.

By Katharine Mieszkowski, Amy Reiter

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Before they’re old enough for two pedals, there’s the LIKEaBIKE, a “balance bike,” which gives your preschooler lots of mobility without training wheels. The child walks — and then runs — with the bike, learning to balance and coast, before graduating to a pedal-bike. Parents love this bike, too, because it means less pushing of their progeny in the stroller or pulling them in the bike trailer on local trips. And as a bonus, you’ll be indoctrinating those tykes into the joys of self-powered transportation, which could be practical in their oil-constrained, greenhouse gas-limited futures. The high-end, German-made LIKEaBIKE retails for about $315 on Amazon, but there’s also the very popular Skuut Balance Bike, which goes for $81.99 on Amazon.

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Katharine Mieszkowski is a Bay Area journalist, who covers science and
the environment. A Salon senior writer from 2000 to 2009, she
chronicled the dot-com boom and bust as a technology correspondent and co-founded the Broadsheet blog.

Her Salon stories have been anthologized in "Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity,"

edited by Michael Lewis, and "The Best of Technology Writing 2007," edited by Steven Levy. (You can read those pieces here and here.)

A Yale grad, Katharine has also written for the New York Times, Mother Jones, MS, Rolling Stone, Glamour and Reader's Digest, while her commentaries have appeared on National Public Radio's "All Things
Considered." In 1994, she joined her first Internet start-up, Women.com, then known as Women's Wire. Since then, she's also been a writer for Fast Company magazine covering Silicon Valley and a columnist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian investigating local subcultures. In 2001, she was named one of the Top 25 Women on the Web by San Francisco Women on the Web.

Katharine, who grew up near Houston, now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and daughter. You can sign up for Twitter updates from her here.