Kids Bike

The Cube Cubie 160 is styled on Cube’s adult mountain bike range, so looks a lot more grown up than some other little bikes.

It’s worth noting that this bike has a rear coaster brake, which means your child has to back pedal to stop. These brakes tend to be more popular in the US and continental Europe than the UK, but can be useful for children who aren’t yet able to operate more traditional brake levers.

The Cube Cubie 160 comes with a rear mudguard to keep off most of the dirt and a chain guard to keep things clean.

Hoy Bikes are renowned as being really reliable, lightweight and fun to ride kids bikes – after all they are the brain child of Sir Chris Hoy, one of the world’s most successful competitive cyclists!

Our 5-year-old tester really enjoyed the Hoy Bonaly 16 bike – she found it easy to brake and steer – plus her parents liked the lightweight and robustness of the bike.

The Frog 78 is the largest of Frog’s three 26″ wheel bikes, and is an all round bike suitable for children (or smaller adults!) with a minimum inside leg of 78cm.   

The handlebars can be adjusted within a 54mm range and there’s a quick release seat post that makes adjusting the saddle height easy to do. Your kid should hopefully therefore get a decent amount of time on this bike, but some kids do grow very rapidly at this age. 

It’s comforting therefore to know the Frog Bikes really hold their value, so if you keep it well maintained you should be able to sell it on to fund the next bike. 

The Frog 69 is no longer available and has been replaced by the Frog 67

If your child has an inside leg of 52cm but doesn’t need a bike with gears, then the Frog 52 Single Speed is a good option. 

You can even take the pedals off and use this bike as a balance bike, and add them back in when the time is ready. 

Note: The Frog 52 Single Speed was discontinued in 2021 so you need to look secondhand for this bike

A fun “Squish” figure and colourful splodges make the Squish 14 an appealing bike for young children starting on their pedalling adventures.

The bike has features such as shortened crank arms, stubby stem and short reach brake levers that are designed to make it easy to ride.

And at just 5.83kg it’s light enough for you to carry home when your sprog has had enough pedalling for one day.

We’ve not tested this particular bike, but you can check out our review of the Squish 18, which is a bigger single speed bike.