Parents' awareness about the characteristics of healthy school backpack at Puncak Alam, Selangor / Nurislah Baharuddin

In Malaysia, it is common thing to see children carrying a backpack especially during school day. Unfortunately, carrying a heavy backpack among schoolchildren has not yet become an issue or concern or threat in Malaysia. The objective of this study is to investigate the knowledge of parents about the characteristic of the school backpack and backpack-related musculoskeletal disorder. The awareness of parents about school backpack was divided into three domains such as standard school backpack, correct carrying of school backpack and musculoskeletal disorder related to the use of backpack. A cross-sectional study design was used to determine the knowledge of parents about the characteristic of the school backpack and backpack­ related musculoskeletal disorder in Puncak Alam area. This study involves 300 parents of elementary school students that live and attend schools in Puncak Alam. The awareness of parent is assessed by using established questionnaire by Javadivala et al. (2012). All statistical analyses were calculated by using IBM SPSS software 20.0. Descriptive analysis was used to determine the awareness of parents. Out of 300 elementary school students, only 102 parents were willing to participate in this study. It consists of 57 mothers (55.9%) and 45 fathers (44.1 %). Approximately, 67 (65.7%) of parents were not aware that backpack should not weigh more than 15% of child's body weight. However, 83 (81.4%) parents were found to be aware that the size of backpack should be fitted to child's body dimension. In conclusion, parent's awareness can manipulate the musculoskeletal pain or discomfort and weight of backpacks carried by their children. A low parental awareness of school backpack weight has connection to high prevalence of musculoskeletal pain amongst schoolchildren. These implied that the recommendation and guidelines concerning the safe load carriage and ways of good ergonomic work practice by schoolchildren are not communicate properly to those involved with child care.