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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Carrying weight from books is good for you. Takes care of your physical fitness and mental fitness.

If the bag is too heavy (especially if unbalanced, like carrying it on one shoulder) then the kid can cause back problems.

See https://scoliosisinstitute.com/heavy-backpacks/ for more details.

There is no excuse for schools being so badly organized that this is a problem. It certainly was not a problem when I was at school in the '60s and early '70s. All the books I needed fitted in a briefcase. It also was not a big problem for my children going to school in Norway between 1990 and 2015.

But children should also be taught how to carry backpacks properly, not unbalanced on one shoulder.

I'm not disagreeing with you. But given silisili's lived experience of dealing with 30lb backpacks, chrisco255's statement about that being 'good for you' is simply not correct, unless perhaps that kid is a high school football player weighing 200+ lbs.

Also, only nerds and dweebs use both shoulder straps.

Rather, I don't think it's a simple matter of education, given that there are also social pressures involved.

To a degree. I was tiny in school, always smallest kid in my grade, and lugging 30 pounds of books around every day means I now have scoliosis.

I would call it "schooliosis" if I were you.

>and lugging 30 pounds of books around every day means I now have scoliosis.

Doctors claim that heavy backpacks don't cause scoliosis, but can make the associated back pain worse.

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