Weather and schedule permitting, Nate D will become the tenth kid who has learned to ride on Soup's battered Yamaha PW50. image by dean

Loyal Soupkast by Honda listeners may remember a segment we did on a podcast last year challenging everyone with the resources to do so to teach a kid to ride a motorcycle. We've been doing this for eight years now, using my eldest son John's 1999 Yamaha PW50 as a training tool/beater loan bike.

This weekend will mark a small milestone as—weather and other related factors willing—we'll teach our tenth kid to ride a motorcycle. Every kid in the Soup neighborhood now knows how to ride. Many of these kids come from families where motorcycles are so foreign to them that them buying a motorcycle was simply just never going to happen. Removing the hurdle of buying a bike and finding someone to teach the kid to ride has been an easy way to knock down any anti-bike parental resistance.

Four of the kids that we have taught to ride have gone on to buy new motorcycles, three have purchased used bikes and the others still come over when the "Pee-Dub" is sitting unused and buzz up and down the driveway. Two are actually on their second bikes now.

Kids that learn to ride when they are still in the single-digit age range grow older having a fearless attitude about riding, quickly become competent riders and laugh in the face of the notion that bikes are too dangerous for children to ride. Plus, when a seven-year old kid learns to ride it seems to give them an amazing amount of self-confidence that transfers to school and other areas of life.

We'd like to think that these kids go on to be life-long motorcyclists, owning and riding bikes for the rest of their lives. However, since the first kid we taught to ride is just 14 now, we actually don't know this is true. What we do know is that we have never met an incompetent adult motorcyclist that learned to ride as a child.

Soup's unofficial teach kids to ride project thanks Yamaha US for the flow of parts, American Honda for at least a half a dozen helmets and more, Jim Allen at Dunlop for tires and Brian at Shift for boxes and boxes of gear.