With so many students spending even more hours in hunched over a computer for remote learning this year, experts are reminding parents that proper workstations are key to avoid aches and pains and the potential for developing repetitive stress injuries.
"We don't think of kids getting repetitive stress injuries or fatigue injuries or musculoskeletal aches and pains like the parents and grandparents get," says Theodore Ganley, MD, an orthopedic surgeon at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics section on orthopedics. But children "are not immune from these things," especially if they work at computers day after day in awkward postures, he said.
"If kids are slouched and sitting with their feet off the ground, they're hunched over, they're staring for hours upon hours without breaks, they can get neck strain, back strain, eye strain," Ganley said. "These are the kinds of things that can affect anyone."
