I was thinking about that when I was dropping my 6 year old off at some hobbies earlier - it’s pretty much expected to have learned how to ride a bicycle before starting school, and it massively expands the area you can go to by yourself. When she went to school by bicycle she can easily make a detour via a shop to spend some pocket money before coming home, while by foot that’d be rather time consuming.
Quite a lot of friends from outside of Europe either can’t ride a bicycle, or were learning it as adult after moving here, though.
edit: the high number of replies mentioning “swimming” made me realize that I had that filed as a basic skill pretty much everybody has - probably due to swimming lessons being a mandatory part of school education here.
I can’t help but commend the legitimately useful comment above me, but also, yes.
Yes, swimming is more complicated than I could possibly understand because I knew how to do it before I knew what I was doing. I’m a native English speaker, so I understand privilege, but swimming seems like such a primal thing to not be able to perform. I have a relatively close friend who can not swim and is scared of open water. It’s weird to me. Maybe there’s a privilege to swimming ability in America, but he’s a white dude, so it’s weird.
English wasn’t the language of my first environment, but other than that, nothing about me, ethnically or not, seems to suggest being underprivileged. Maybe it’s just my luck.