As kids trade in their beach towels and flip-flops for textbooks and pencils, there’s one often-overlooked concern parents should to be aware of when shopping for school supplies: How much weight kids carry in their backpacks.
Backpacks are convenient for students and can provide a creative outlet for them to express their personalities, but parents shouldn’t allow their kids to choose a backpack purely based on looks.
According to the American Chiropractic Association, young children are struggling with back pain significantly more than previous generations. ACA recommends that your child’s backpack weigh no more than 5 to 10 percent of his or her body weight and never hang more than four inches below their waistline — yet statistics show that only 4 percent of parents actually weigh their child’s backpack.
Compared to shoulder bags or messenger bags, when worn correctly, backpacks allow for more support from the abdomen and back muscles. Overly-heavy backpacks can tug kids backward, forcing them to bend forward; backpacks that hang too low increase the weight that rests on their shoulders, which also causes a progressive tilt. These positions can make the spine compress unnaturally, leading to shoulder, neck and back pain.
To reduce the load that kids carry, Dr. Shara Posner, a pediatric-certified chiropractor with the Back to Health Center in Alexandria, recommends buying backpacks that are ergonomically designed for weight distribution.
"When you look at the backpack, it should never be wider than your child or longer than your child’s torso.” This is why packs such as those with multiple compartments, shoulder strap padding, or chest and hip straps are better long-term.
“As a parent, and especially as an American parent, we tend to think that bigger is better,” Posner said. “The key here is that the bigger the backpack, the more our child is going to stuff into it. If you keep the backpack relatively small, then you tend to have less room to put things in.”
If your child is complaining about neck or back pain, there are a few preliminary actions to take.
First, check the weight of their backpack and make adjustments to how much they are carrying. Then, bring them in to see a chiropractor — specifically one who is pediatric certified, meaning they've completed additional training to cater to the needs of the pediatric population and know more than the average chiropractor as to the modifications that need to be made in order to work on a young spine.
Second, get your child into some sort of yoga or core stability practice. Athletic activity is great for kids and forces them to log off of their computers and actively engage in physical movements outside of school. The more active your child is and the more they move, the more you can offset their potential for backpack-related pain.
