The Kids Are Going to Be Alright

It is a common complaint: “Kids these days…” Fill in the complaint du jour. Right now, the biggest complaint is about so few kids taking up motorcycling. That’s completely understandable. We care about our passion and hope that future generations can discover the joys of being on two wheels. Like many other riders who—even if they don’t voice this kind of shouting at clouds out loud—I still internalize an opinion amounting to, “Kids these days aren’t interested in riding.” I’m guilty as charged.

If we stop jumping to conclusions and begin to analyze the root causes, we can easily identify a mosaic of contributing factors for this phenomenon. But I’d like to address a single factor and suggest that we should definitely shift our speculation away from simply blaming the kids.

Like many other riders with a little gray in their beards, I grew up riding motorcycles that simply existed all around me. It might have been an uncle, a cousin, or a neighbor with a bike that offered a ride. They’d also often serve colorful bike-sizing guidelines, like, “You can ride any bike you can pick up,” or, “If you can kickstart it, you can ride it.” Even if I lived in a suburban area, there was always some kind of prospective bike loaner. The edges of that suburbia also happened to be areas with an extremely lax idea of what might be acceptable behavior on a city street.