El Cajon Chiropractor - Is texting ruining our kids posture?

Notice the forward head & shoulder position

Twitter, texting, & video games.  What do they have in common?  Well, our kids’ posture is being destroyed by them.  If you’ve ever watched kids during a texting frenzy, you would’ve seen the classic posture: head down, neck craned forward, and shoulder rolled in toward the front of the body.  A recent study published in the Journal of School Health found that 38.3% of children had poor posture.  An even more interesting number was that at 7 years old, the % of children with poor posture was only 33% while 11-year-olds were found be at 41%.  As the children get to the age where they are trusted with cell phones, their posture gets dramatically worse.  The most common complaints amongst the poor posture group were headaches, neck pain, & low back pain.  As Chiropractors, we have seen an increase in neck and back symptoms in a younger group. 

Notice the forward head
& shoulder position

The posture plague may have begun when schools eliminated lockers back in the early 1990s.  Kids were required to haul around backpacks with up to 6-8 books in them and these backpacks began to increase in weight up to 50 lbs.  This forced the kids to pull their heads & shoulders forward to handle the load.  Who exactly thought it was a good idea to put a 50 lb. backpack on a 60 pound child?  After this came the hand-held video game craze which took kids with forward head and shoulder posture, and kept them in this posture long after their school books had been cast aside for the day.  The next big thing was texting.  The average teenager sends 60 texts per day.  That adds up to 1,800 text messages per month.  A study found that while texting, children’s heads sit 4-1/2 inches in front of neutral.  This is a lot of spent in a “buzzard posture” after spending even more time with the video games and carrying the heavy backpack.  Add on top of this facebook & homework on the computer it seems that kids are only out of this poor posture when they are lying on their backs in bed!

A buzzard with buzzard posture

A kid texting in buzzard posture

So what’s the big deal if you have bad posture?  Anterior head carriage as it’s called, can produce up to 30 lbs. of additional pressure on the neck.  That’s like walking around all day with a cinder block on top of your head.  Imagine doing that 5, 10, or 20 years.  This can lead to degenerative arthritis in the neck at younger and younger ages.  Also, symptoms most influenced by poor posture are spinal pain, headache, mood, blood pressure, pulse, and lung capacity.  On top of that, older adults with increased curve in the midback, called hyperkyphosis, have a higher rate of mortality.

Hyperkyphosis

What is being done about this?  Well, more schools are going to 2 sets of books (1 for school, 1 for home) and some are even using digital books.  This should help some with correcting posture, but not the lion's share.  Let’s face it folks, texting, twitter, video games, backpacks, facebook, & homework are going to be here for a while.  Why not bring your child in for a Chiropractic consultation so that they don’t grow up to suffer with the same health problems that you have endured?

Dr. Dennis Barker DC is a Chiropractor in the Community of Fletcher Hills serving the cities of El Cajon, La Mesa, Santee and all of San Diego County.

Visit us at www.fletcherhillschiropractic.com and www.facebook.com/fletcherhillschiro