Five-year-old Ken Mogeni stoops forward heavily as he struggles with the big school bag on his back. The boy cuts an interesting figure ferrying such a huge load despite being in the pre-unit section of High Gate Academy, Nairobi.
In pre-unit you join dots to create shapes, colour pictures and spend a lot of time figuring out the difference between ‘9’ and ‘P’. Or ‘b’ and ‘d’, meaning you don’t need to carry two kilogrammes of books.
But this doesn’t happen in Kenya only.
Significant numbers of teens regularly carry rucksacks to school that top 10 to 15 per cent of their body weight, and risk back pain and other related disorders, finds research published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood.
Although Mogeni just walks a few metres from his home to the bus stop where the school van picks and drops him everyday, doctors and health experts say heavy school bags on tender shoulders and backs, even for such a short distance, are enough to cause health problems. The bulging academic load weighs not less than seven kilogrammes.
“Many of these children are carrying a quarter of their body weight over their shoulders for a large portion of the day,” writes American chiropractor Dr Scott Bauch on usgovinfo.about.com.
An expert in the treatment of misalignments of the joints and the spinal column, and the resulting disorders, Dr Bauch adds: “That’s equivalent to an 80-kilogramme man carrying around a 20-kilogramme load”.
We escort Master Mogeni into the bus, where he settles down among three other children in a seat meant for two. A film of thin sweat is already building on his small forehead.
It’s hard to tell whether it’s from the heavy academic load he just managed to ferry from the house or because of the unusual spectacle of seeing two strange adults following him.
The other children look equally unamused by these two intruders, especially the one with a camera.
But their anxiety is assuaged by a few assuring words from their teacher, who calmly asks Mogeni to open the bag so that we can have a look at its contents. Mogeni is carrying a toy watch, two lunch boxes, a spare pullover, a bottle of water, and a number of text and exercise books.
Asked whether he uses all the items stuffed in his bulging school bag, the boy keeps mum, probably because Mummy warned him against speaking to strangers.
“Some of the stuff that school children put in their bags could be disposed of or be left at home since it is not needed on a daily basis,” writes Dr Bauch. “The teacher should discuss with the parents about this to ensure the child packs only what they need to avoid loading excess weight”.
Although to some parents packing huge bags for their school going children is a harmless affair, studies have shown that overloading children increases their risk of developing lifelong disorders like perennial back pain, wrong posture, stooping gait and muscle spasms.According to the American Chiropractic Association (ACA), heavy bags were the cause of 7,000 emergency room visits and countless complaints of bodily muscles among school-going US children in 2001.
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