Why Leaving Extra Space in Your Kid’s Backpack This School Year Makes a Difference
The first Tuesday of this school year, I found Mia hunched over her desk by the door, neon horse-covered backpack splayed open at her feet, 12 crayons rolling across the tile toward my feet. Her zipper had split right down the middle an hour into class, and she was biting her lip hard enough to turn it pink, trying to stuff everything back in before anyone else noticed.
Mia’s mom had bought that backpack for her 10th birthday, and it was exactly the size it was supposed to be for a 4th grader. The problem wasn’t the backpack—it was everything inside. She had seven new folders, even though we only needed three. She had 15 sharpened pencils, five glue sticks, four different erasers, a full pack of construction paper she’d insisted on bringing, her rock collection from summer camp, a stuffed pony that usually stays at home, and three different bottles of hand sanitizer. When I asked her why she brought all of it, she shrugged and said “Mom said better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.”
I helped her corral the crayons, and we carried the whole mess over to her cubby to sort through it. We stuffed all the extra pencils and glue sticks into a zipper bag to keep on the shelf, stacked the unused folders in the back, and tucked the rock collection and stuffed pony out of the way. By the time we were done, her backpack only held her math workbook, her reading folder, her lunch box, and a water bottle. There was enough empty space left to fit my entire lesson planner in there, easy.
I’ve been teaching 4th grade for 12 years, and this is the same scene I see almost every opening week. Parents and kids show up with every supply the list mentions, plus a dozen extras, stuffed so tight into the backpack you can barely pull the zipper closed. No one thinks anything of it, until the zipper breaks, or the kid complains their shoulders hurt, or they miss 10 minutes of math every day digging through a pile of extra stuff to find their highlighter.
I used to just help them clean it out and move on, but a few years ago I started tracking how much extra stuff kids carry, and what that means for their daily routine. The average backpack weight for my students that year was 17 and a half pounds. For most of my kids, that’s almost 25% of their entire body weight. Pediatricians will tell you that’s too heavy for growing spines, which makes sense. What I’ve noticed that no one talks about much is what that extra stuff does to their focus.
When a kid has to dig through three pounds of unused junk every time they need a ruler, they’re not just wasting class time. They get frustrated, they forget what they were looking for halfway through, and by the time they fish it out, they’ve missed the first three instructions for the activity. I’ve had multiple kids tell me they hate school because they can never find anything, when the whole problem is just they have too much stuff to sort through.
The rule I tell parents now is simple: leave at least one third of your kid’s backpack completely empty. You don’t have to break out a measuring tape to get it right, either. If you can zip the backpack closed easily with one hand, without shoving or squishing the contents, you’re good. If you have to sit on it to pull the zipper closed, you’ve definitely got too much stuff.
Most elementary schools give kids a cubby or small locker to keep stuff in, so there’s no reason to carry everything home every night. Extra supplies stay at school. Half-finished art projects can stay at school until the end of the week, instead of being carted back and forth daily. For middle school kids on block schedules, there’s no reason to bring every notebook and textbook for every class every single day—just pack what you need for that day’s rotation. I also tell parents to do a 5 minute backpack sort with their kid every Sunday night. Have them dump everything out, toss any old trash or half-eaten granola bars, take out anything they don’t need for the week, and repack. It takes less time than making a bowl of cereal, and it keeps extra stuff from building back up over the week.
After I sorted Mia’s backpack that first day, I sent a quick note to her mom explaining what we’d done. She wrote back a few hours later saying she got it, that she’d been the one to encourage Mia to bring everything. She still remembered being 9 years old, forgetting her math workbook at home and getting a failing grade on her homework, and she’d spent years since then convinced being prepared meant bringing everything you could possibly need. I wrote back and said I got it too—that fear of being caught off guard sticks with you, even when you’re grown. But I’ve never had a kid fail an assignment because they left an extra glue stick at school. Ninety nine percent of the time, the thing they “might need” never gets used, and it just ends up taking up space.
Two weeks in, Mia still sneaks an extra rock or two into her backpack most days, to show her friends on the bus. Her and her mom do the 5 minute sort every Sunday, though, so the extra always comes back out. Last week, she was the first kid to pull out her math workbook when I called for it, no digging, no frustration. I still have parents ask me if this is just about not overpacking, or if there’s a bigger catch. It’s not a big magic fix for bad grades or anxiety or any of the hard stuff that comes with being a kid in school. It’s just a small thing, leaving a little empty space. Most days, that’s all you need.
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