Is Customizing Your Kid’s New Back-to-School Backpack Good For Them? A Parent’s Perspective
I was leaning against the cart in Target’s parking lot last month, 12 minutes late to pick up my 7-year-old from soccer practice, my oat milk latte sweating through the cup holder into my purse, when my 10-year-old Lila tugged my sleeve. The plain black backpack we’d just bought for fifth grade was still folded in the plastic bag in the cart, and the pop-up custom patch stand by the exit was blowing warm, vinyl-scented air into our faces.
“Can I get three?” she said, pointing. “The orange cat, the little galaxy, and the rainbow that says Book Worm. I’ll pay with my birthday money.”
I almost said no. We’d already gone $15 over budget on new sneakers that had the sparkly sole she insisted on, and I’d always bought backpacks based on how many compartments they had and whether the material would hold up to being dragged through cafeteria mud, not how many patches you could stick on it. Customization always felt like a marketing trick, something to get parents to spend extra money on a thing that would just get torn up by Christmas anyway. But I looked at her, leaning in, shoes scuffed from climbing the monkey bars at the park, and I nodded. She counted out $12 from the crumpled bills in her wallet, and we waited 10 minutes while the guy ironed them on. She moved the cat patch twice before he pressed it down, lopsided, just the way she wanted it.
On the drive to soccer, my son Jax leaned over from the back seat and stared at the backpack. “That’s dumb,” he said. “My backpack has Minecraft on it already, I didn’t have to pay extra.” Lila rolled her eyes and tucked the strap close to her chest. “At least mine is mine,” she said.
I didn’t think much of it after that, until the first week of school. Last year, Lila came home complaining about her backpack at least once a week. It was the same popular brand half the girls in her class had, and she kept mixing hers up with someone else’s at dismissal. She forgot her lunch box at least twice a month, and usually dumped her backpack by the door the second she got home and wouldn’t touch it until it was time to leave the next morning.
This year is different. She takes five minutes every morning to rearrange her stuff before she gets on the bus. She hasn’t left anything at school yet, even her water bottle—she stuck a matching cat sticker on that, too, and clips it to the side carabiner she picked out herself. When she gets home, she swings the backpack into the living room and tells me about the kid who asked where she got the orange cat patch, because she has a cat that looks just like ours. Her teacher sent a quick check-in text last week, and mentioned Lila’s been raising her hand more during group discussions than she did last year.
I texted my sister, who’s a fourth grade teacher, about it last weekend. She said she notices this every year. At the start of every term, she lets kids decorate their own writing notebooks before they start using them. The kids who get to pick their own stickers and draw whatever they want on the cover turn in more writing, and take better care of the notebooks, than the kids who get pre-printed notebooks from the school. It’s not that decorating makes them smarter, she said. It’s just that when something feels like yours, you care more about it.
That makes sense, when you stop to think about it. A backpack isn’t just a bag to carry books. It’s the one thing your kid carries with them everywhere they go all day. It holds their lucky eraser, the half-eaten granola bar they saved for recess, the note their best friend passed them during math. It’s their first small public thing that they get to control, when so much of school is what adults tell them to do: sit here, use this pencil, write this topic. Letting them customize it is just letting them have that small piece of control.
It’s not all perfect, of course. Last week, Lila came home with a free frog sticker from the library book fair and had a 10-minute meltdown because I wouldn’t stop folding laundry to iron it on right then. It’s more expensive than just grabbing a pre-decorated backpack off the shelf, and I know the patches will start peeling off by spring. And if your kid doesn’t care about customizing, that’s fine too—Jax was perfectly happy with his pre-printed Minecraft backpack, and that works for him. The point isn’t to force every kid to customize, it’s to give them the choice.
You don’t have to spend a lot of money to do it, either. If patches are out of your budget, let them use stickers they get for free from the dentist or the library, or draw on it with fabric markers, or glue on pictures from old magazines. You don’t have to get it done before the first day of school, either. Let them add things little by little over the first month, as they get new stickers or patches from events. And if they want to put their patch on lopsided, or stick a giant silly sticker right in the middle of the front that you think looks terrible, just leave it. It’s not your backpack.
Last night, I walked past the living room and saw Lila cross-legged on the floor, rearranging her patches for the fourth time this week. She moved the galaxy patch from the bottom corner to the side, and stuck a sticky note with her best friend’s new phone number on the inside pocket. There’s already a chewed-up gum wrapper stuck in the bottom mesh pocket, and the frog sticker is peeling at the edges.
Is customizing a new backpack some big, necessary thing for kids? I don’t know. It’s just a backpack, after all. But for us, it’s worked. I still think the marketing teams win a little when we spend extra on patches, but I can’t argue with the result: Lila carries her backpack like it’s something that matters, and so far, that’s made the start of the year a lot easier.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Is Customizing Your Kid’s New Back-to-School Backpack Good For Them