Potential Problems with School Backpacks and Guidelines for Backpack Safety

September is National Backpack Safety Month. I am not making this up. With this in mind, let us focus on backpacks and why there must be month promoting the safety of them. One conclusion is that without proper safety guidelines, injuries could occur.

Though they may be practical and even a necessity, they can present burgeoning hazards. In the art of keeping a student organized, backpacks can be instrumental in being a successful tool to help a student achieve his or her highest potential. But even as they are designed to even distribute the weight across a body, injuries happen because we do not use them the way they were designed.

Potential problems with backpacks

Many factors can result in back pain. Being active in too many sports, not enough sports or physical activity, and poor posture, backpacks have gained ground as common factor. Does that mean parents everywhere must ban together and stop the use of backpacks as they are simply too dangerous for our children to use? Does this mean that parents should demand that children engage in all sports and less homework to lower the risk of back injury? Ahh, no.

There are steps to take, guidelines to follow to ensure a child can carry around a backpack without a resulting injury. Consider this and be honest here, is your child a bit on the small side? Is he or she carrying around his or her locker contents daily to and from school, classes, and home? Moreover, the contents could be almost doubled by the amount of personal items children today cart around.

Doctors and physical therapists recommend a child carry no more than 10-15 % of their body weight in their backpacks. Have you tried this experiment? 10 to 15% of our body weight in a pack to work and home for a day? Not as easy as one might think, but very achievable.

A child's spine consists of thirty-three vertebrae bones. Between each vertebrae bone is a disk, a shock absorber. When a heavy backpack is improperly placed on a child's shoulders, the weight is not uniformly dispersed. The added weight can affect a child to pull backward, and in an effort to compensate, a child can unconsciously bend forward at the hips or arch his or her back. All of this can result in back, neck and shoulder pain.

Does your child wear his or her backpack over just one shoulder? If so, back pain could develop from the weight not being adequately distributed. Many of us think that simply to sit up straight will result in good posture, but by wearing a backpack over just one shoulder can also be a cause of poor posture.

Moreover, a backpack with constricted bands that nudge into the shoulders can hamper with circulation and nerves. Has your child complained of tingling, numbness and/or weakness in his or her hands? The backpack may indeed be the culprit.

Not only is the risk there from carrying a backpack incorrectly on the shoulder but from other ways as well. Has a student toting a backpack ever bumped into you? Sometimes the jostle is enough to make you step or stumble back a few feet. However, even though you may have forgotten the incident, that little bruise or stiffness you have may have been the result.

Have you ever tripped over a backpack on the bus or in the hall? They are bulk-some and take up more room than most realize.

With all this risk should backpacks even be allowed in schools? Ahh, yes. Nevertheless, there are a few guidelines to help ensure the overall physical safety from backpack danger to your child.

Guidelines for safe backpack use

When shopping for a backpack, go the safer route, not the trendy route. Canvas ones are more lightweight than leather. Look for ones with two wide and padded shoulder straps. Is the back padded as well? No reason to add injury upon injury and prove the pen is mighty than the sword by being stabbed with one through the sheer lining of an unsubstantial backpack.

Is there really a need to cart around a locker full of books daily? Determine what is needed on what days and stick to that schedule. Remind your child that lockers are there for a reason.

In celebration of backpack safety month, watch your child walk with a backpack. Is it too heavy?

Is your child teetering in the mornings? The culprit could be the result of a too heavy backpack. This does mean meet your child after every class and carry the backpack for him or her. To do so, while ten to fifteen per cent of our body weight means the ability to carry a heavier load, would, yes, prevent potential injury and pain on a physical level, would most assuredly cause pain and injury on an emotional level. Do not go so overboard. Rather, lighten the load and distribute evenly. Encourage learning, but not at the risk of injury.