Health: Backpack Safety

You’d think with all the technology and miniaturization of phones, computers, stereo systems and everything else, that kids would reap some of the benefits when it comes to carrying around books, but the state of the backpack couldn’t be worse. Schools still have not gone electronic, in spite of computers in pretty much every classroom. The textbook industry is thriving and academia hasn’t caught up with the books on disc idea.

Students get at least one book per class and by the time they’re in middle school and high school, that’s five or six classes. In addition, just to make matters worse, kids who’s parents are divorced — and that’s usually 50 percent of most student bodies — have two homes during the week: mom’s house and dad’s house. These children of divorce are rarely if ever given two sets of books — one set for mom’s house and one set for dad’s house, so they’re forced to tote the same books to school and home every day to make sure the books are at the correct home where their custody schedule lands them, so they can do their homework. Kids with only one home can leave their books at their one home, and know that they’ll be there later. Kids with two homes don’t have that luxury, so between the bad backs they’re getting and the anxiety about keeping track of the books and the custody schedule, they’re a wreck.

Some of these loads of books have got to be permanently injuring children’s muscular skeletal systems at the very least, and it can’t be too long before there’s a class action law suit in the works!