Looking for the best kids’ hoverboard? I wasted three weekends so you don’t have to
My 8-year-old has been begging for a hoverboard ever since his cousin brought one to our family barbecue back in June. He spent the whole party zooming up and down the driveway, clinging to his cousin’s elbow, and wouldn’t stop talking about it for two weeks straight. I figured this would be easy: pull up Amazon, type in “hoverboard for kids”, pick one with good reviews, check out. Done. I had no idea it would take me three whole weekends just to get one that didn’t break before the first hour of riding was up.
The first one I got was a no-name brand, less than $100, had like 10,000 5-star reviews. Looked great in the photos. It showed up two days later, box was bashed in one corner, but I figured that was just shipping. We charged it overnight like the instructions said, and the next morning my kid pulled on his helmet and ran out to the sidewalk. Twelve minutes later he came walking back, dragging it, it had just died mid-roll and wouldn’t turn on. I tried plugging it back in, the charger just blinked red, and the battery smelled that weird acrid plastic that makes you nervous about leaving it in the house. I had to carry the dead thing back up the steep hill to our house, my lower back ached for two days, and my kid sat on the porch crying like I’d ruined his whole life. Returning it took another hour on chat with some support person who kept asking me to upload photos of the broken part, which I did, and then they still took a week to give me my money back.
I complained about it at the playground the next week, and another mom said she’d bought her daughter’s at Target, no problems. So I drove over to Target that Saturday. They had them stacked by the front entrance, right next to the big display of Halloween candy that they’d put out in mid-July for some reason. Selection was two models: one neon pink that my son refused to even stand next to (said it was “for girls”, I rolled my eyes but whatever), the other black with a big Spider-Man logo that he immediately latched onto. It was $150, which felt reasonable, but we couldn’t open the box before buying, so we hauled it out to the car, brought it home. Turns out that thing weighs 30 pounds. My son is 52 pounds soaking wet. He couldn’t even pick it up to get it out of the trunk, and when he did finally get it on the sidewalk, he couldn’t steer it to save his life. It was too heavy for his little feet to adjust the tilt properly, he kept tipping over. Returning that was another whole thing: I had to box it back up, load it back in the car, drive back to Target, wait in line at customer service for 20 minutes. By the time I got home, I was ready to just tell my kid hoverboards were banned forever.
A couple days later I was at my son’s soccer practice, complaining to the other dads about the whole mess, and this guy named Joe told me to go check out the little toy shop on Main Street, the one that’s been there since the 80s, with the wooden train display in the window. I drive past it every day and never go in, honestly. I just assumed it was overpriced and only sold fancy wooden puzzles for rich kids’ birthday parties. But I was desperate, so I dragged my son there the next Saturday.
The place smells like buttered popcorn and old stuffed animals, just like you’d expect. The owner is this guy named Gary, wears a faded flannel shirt, has a parrot that usually sits on the counter, but that day the parrot was at the vet getting a beak trim, so there was just a handwritten sign on the empty cage that said “Gone for a checkup, no I won’t tell you what he did to his beak”. Gary didn’t just point me to the shelf with hoverboards. He asked how old my kid was, how much he weighed, whether he mostly rides around the neighborhood or just on our flat driveway. I told him all the bad stuff that happened with the first two, and he nodded like he hears that story at least once a week.
He pulled out a lighter model, 22 pounds, had a speed limiter that I could turn off once my kid got better at riding, said it had a battery that wasn’t on any of the recall lists he checks every month. Then he said “go take it around the parking lot out front, test it. If he hates it, no harm no foul.” My kid zoomed around that potholed parking lot for 10 minutes, grinning so wide his cheeks hurt, came back and said this was the one, no question.
It was $170, so $20 more than the Spider-Man one from Target. I almost balked, honestly, because $20 is $20, that’s a whole box of popsicles and a new pack of markers for the kid. But then Gary said “I know I’m not cheaper than Amazon or Target. But if this thing dies in the next year, you bring it back here, I’ll swap it for a new one right now. You don’t have to wait on hold for three hours, you don’t have to box it up and ship it back to someone who doesn’t care what happens to you. I stand behind this.” That sold me right there.
I’ll be honest, there are other options that work for other people. If you’re on a super tight budget, Facebook Marketplace isn’t bad, if you go test it first and check the battery for swelling. My neighbor got a used one for $40 that her kid outgrew, and it’s worked fine for months. But I’m still weird about used lithium ion batteries after a friend had one swell up and leak in her garage, so that’s just my hangup, not a rule. And if you need one same day for a birthday party and the local shop’s closed, just don’t get the cheapest no-name one on Amazon, stick to the brands you’ve actually heard of before. That’s my only real tip.
It’s been three weeks now. My kid rides it every single day after school, fell off yesterday and scraped his knee all up, still wouldn’t come inside for dinner until he’d done three more laps around the block. The hoverboard’s still working perfectly. I don’t know if it’s the absolute best hoverboard in the whole world, or that it’ll be the best for your kid. But I do know I wasted three weekends running around returning broken junk, and the best thing I ever did was stop trying to get the cheapest deal and go to the little local shop that actually cares if the thing works. It’s not some big moral or anything. It just saved me a whole lot of hassle. That’s good enough for me.
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