Isn't that a massive oversight on the side of the parents? Swimming and riding a bike should really be one of the basic things you teach your kids.
My parents spent probably hundreds on extra swimming lessons beyond the ones we got at school. Made next to no difference. I get by with a shitty poor man's freestyle and a doggy paddle and just floundering about.
As for riding a bike, multitude of factors. I had one as a very young kid, but the training wheels never came off. It fell to bits, and my parents never replaced it. I don't think my mum can ride a bike (or swim), so she couldn't teach me, and my dad never made much of an effort to teach me anything, other than to keep quiet, chop wood and handle a herd of cows.
We lived on a farm about fifteen or twenty minutes drive from the nearest town, and no parent in their right mind would let their kids ride a bike into town on a one-lane New Zealand country road, you'd be roadkill within a few months. So I couldn't actually get anywhere on a bike even if I had learned, meaning it had little practical use. That was the state of affairs until we finally moved into a town when I was 16.
On top of that, I was a terribly geeky child from a fairly young age. By the time I was six or seven, I didn't want a bike anymore, I wanted a typewriter. We were very poor when I was growing up, so if us kids didn't specifically ask for something, it was money my parents didn't have to think about how they were going to find, which was only a good thing.
Some of my friends tried to teach me. It never went well. But New Zealand's a society where everyone's obsessed with cars, (
http://www.stuff.co.nz/technology/digital-living/7601531/Google-Earth-man-warns-Kiwis-addicted-to-cars) so as soon as you reach the age of 15-16 and you can legally drive, you wouldn't want to be seen dead on a bicycle. So it stopped coming up eventually.
There have been points in recent times where I've told myself I should learn, (the most recent only a few months ago when I moved to Taiwan) and I may even enjoy it. But honestly, I don't want to have to put myself through the embarrassment, or the injuries that I'll likely suffer learning. I have a general attitude of "I've gotten by up til this point, might as well just keep going".
