Maybe it is time for kids to ditch the heavy schoolbooks and adopt the ipad as the main school textbook of choice? That would certainly give back pain relief for kids carrying schoolbags to school.

Many children are burdened with very heavy loads with schoolbooks and other extras packed into their bags. Not a good time to start getting back pain – at age 10 and under. Lets hope modern technology can help fix this problem and that over the next decade all kids carry is some form of tablet or notepad that takes the place of heavy text books.

Back Pain Relief For Kids Carrying Schoolbags

Maybe in the future the use of notebooks and tablets can give back pain relief for kids carrying schoolbags

It’s a burden perhaps even Atlas would have balked at. School bags, despite attempts by education boards and complaints from parents, remain back-breakingly heavy and dwarf the students carrying them. The Kendriya Vidyalayas and CBSE schools may have set an upper limit on the weight of schoolbags some time back, but the plight of students struggling to lift their bags still isn’t a weighty issue in many schools.

 

Notebooks have given way to a netbook in higher classes and some schools have even installed lockers in classrooms. However, most children lug heavy bags to schools, some wheeling in mini suitcases packed with books.

 

At Green Lawns School, the number of subjects taught in a day has been reduced and kids attending elementary school are asked to leave their books behind. Principal Kiran Bajaj said, “We also teach some subjects without textbooks and use modules on computers. But some students are not comfortable leaving their books back, either at home or in school.”

 

“Sadly, our kids still lug heavy bags. We have desks with locks for the middle school, but students of the senior school have to carry their books around,” said Meera Issacs, principal of Cathedral and John Connon School.

 

Studies by British back health charity BackCare and ICPA, New Zealand, say a child’s backpack should weigh no more than 10% of that child’s body weight and it should be worn over both shoulders so the weight is distributed evenly across the back. BackCare went to add that a well-designed schoolbag with a padded back panel is far more comfortable and less fatiguing.

 

Keeping in line with that research, the new policy laid down for the country’s 981 Kendriya Vidyalayas across India stipulates that schoolbags for classes I and II should not weigh more than 2 kg. For classes III and IV, the bag weight should be less than 3 kg, and those studying in classes V to VIII shouldn’t carry bags more than 4 kg. The upper limit for senior classes – IX to XII – has been set at 6 kg. More than a million children study in Kendriya Vidyalayas. But research shows that the average weight of a school bag for primary school students in Mumbai is around 9 kg. This, though parents in some schools have raised the issue of reducing the weight of school bags at PTA meetings.  .. …see full article here…

Its one thing to stipulate minimum weights for kids schoolbags to help get back pain relief for kids carrying schoolbags, but wouldn’t the best solution be to keep textbooks at school if required, and provide all the texts to schoolchildren online via the internet. These texts could then be accessed via computers or notebooks that kids would need to carry. The cost is the issue, but what about the physical and mental cots to children who start off down the path of lower back pain from a very young age due to lifting techniques acquired at a very young age?