Why My Child’s Backpack Weighs Ten Kilos — and Why She Can’t Leave It at School
The sound came first. A dull thud, followed by a grunt. I looked up from making toast to see my daughter, age nine, trying to hoist her school bag off the kitchen floor. She had to squat, get both arms through the straps, then arch her back like a tiny sherpa preparing to summit Everest. The bag didn’t budge at first. She groaned, adjusted, tried again.
“Mum, can you carry it to the car?”
I said no. Not because I wanted to be tough, but because I couldn’t believe she couldn’t do it herself. So we stood there, her with the bag half on, me with the butter knife, both of us annoyed.
Then I picked it up. And I said a word I don’t usually say before 8am.
It must have been close to ten kilos. Maybe more. She’s nine. She weighs about thirty kilos. So she was carrying roughly one-third of her body weight to school and back, every single day.
That evening, I asked her to dump everything out on the living room floor. We found: two thick novels, a maths exercise book, an English workbook, a spelling folder, a recorder, a PE shirt that had been there since Tuesday, a water bottle, a pencil case the size of a shoebox, and a crumpled permission slip for a school trip that had already happened. Also three plastic rulers, because apparently she needs multiples.
“Do you need all this today?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But I can’t take it out because we don’t have lockers.”
That was the real thing. Her school doesn’t have cubbies or lockers for intermediate students. There’s a coat hook, but no storage. Every book, folder, and instrument travels home each day, regardless of whether it’s needed. The classroom has a small shelf, but one teacher says it’s too messy, another says they don’t want kids moving around during lessons, and the fire marshal apparently hates clutter in corridors. So the rule is: take everything home.
I get it, sort of. Schools are worried about lost items, forgotten homework, and the liability of leaving things in shared spaces. But we’ve built this bizarre situation where a child’s entire academic life is carried around like a nomad’s load. It’s not just uncomfortable. It’s actually bad for them.
There’s real research on this. Most paediatric guidelines say a school backpack shouldn’t exceed ten to fifteen percent of a child’s body weight. My daughter was at thirty percent. Even a small detention-avoidance strategy like leaving a heavy book at school could help, but she can’t because there’s nowhere to leave it.
The physical effects aren’t dramatic like falling over. They’re slow. She complains her shoulders ache at night. She has red marks from the straps. When she gets out of the car at drop-off, she swings the bag onto one shoulder because putting it on both feels too restrictive. That’s worse for her spine. She also leans forward when she walks, like she’s pushing against a wind.
I asked her school nurse about it once. She told me, in a low voice, that she sees kids with back pain all the time. She said a lot of parents complain, but there’s no official policy about bag weight. Each teacher assigns materials independently, and no one coordinates the total load.
So what are we supposed to do?
We can’t change the system overnight, but we can change some of what happens at home. The first thing I did was buy a digital bathroom scale and made it part of our routine. Every Sunday night, we weigh her bag. She thinks it’s a game, but it’s actually just me trying to get a number before she leaves. The target is four kilograms max. We’re not there yet. On Thursday’s packed bag it was six and a half.
Then we made a “night before” rule. No more packing in the morning. She packs her bag the night before, while I watch. I ask three questions: Do you need this book tomorrow? Is that folder for tomorrow? Can you fit this into one binder? It sounds like nagging, but it has become a habit. She now knows her timetable. For the first time, she realised she didn’t need her English workbook on days she has no English.
The recorder was another battle. She has music on Monday and Wednesday only. But she brought it to school on Thursday because she wanted to practice with a friend at lunch. That’s sweet. But it added weight. So we bought a separate, cheap recorder to keep at school. That’s a small change that actually worked. The teacher allowed it. The music teacher said yes. It took one email.
The pencil case was insane. It had a hundred items. We emptied it and made a tiny one with three pens, two pencils, a sharpener, eraser, and a highlighter. The big one now lives in the car. She hasn’t missed it. She hasn’t even missed it once.
But the real fix would be school-side. So I’ve started asking other parents what they think. A few have done the same. One mum wrote to the principal requesting that books be kept in class. The principal replied that they “don’t have storage” but they’d “look into it.” That was three months ago.
I’m not holding my breath. But I did overhear two teachers talking outside the classroom one rainy afternoon. A younger teacher said: “I wish we could just leave this bloody heavy stuff and bag at school every day.” That exact phrase. It was a quiet moment of shared exhaustion. I nodded at her and she nodded back. Neither of us said anything loud. But at least we knew we were on the same team.
That simple sentence stuck with me. It’s not about being lazy. It’s about the strangeness of making kids haul everything all the time. Adults get lockers. Office workers put files on shared drives. Even factory workers have pigeonholes. But kids are expected to act like moving trucks.
So now we’re trying a rolling backpack. She was embarrassed at first. She thought it made her look babyish. But after two weeks, she said she’ll never go back to carrying. She still carries it up stairs, but she can wheel it between classes and out to the car. The teachers didn’t complain, except one who said it got in the way in the narrow corridor. She asked if she could leave it near the door. They said yes. For now.
It’s not perfect. The wheels are cheap, she has to drag it over gravel at the gate, and I’m afraid it’ll break by Easter. But it’s bought us time.
I don’t have a clean answer. I’m not going to pretend this is solved. We still have heavy days. She still forgets things at home sometimes. Her teacher still sends photos of thirty bags piled at the back of the room during wet play. But I’ve stopped just grumbling about it. We’ve set a number, we’ve lightened the load where we can, and we’ve started talking to the school instead of just muttering at the kitchen bench.
Maybe one day she’ll walk through the door with just a lunch box and a pencil. I think about that a lot. But for now, I’ll settle for her straightening up when she stands, and for her saying, “Mum, it’s fine,” when I ask if her shoulders hurt. That’s enough. And if the teachers ever work out the storage thing, I might even believe in miracles.
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