Parents and grandparents

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To have children or grandchildren is a wonderful thing, but especially in the first years of their lives, the urge to hold them and carry them in your arms can increase the risk of acquiring back pain or aggravating existing pain.

This section of the Web of the Back reviews measures for living a normal life as a parent or grandparent - including carrying your child or grandchild when necessary - while preventing back pain, and effective treatments if it does occur.

If you are interested in measures that your children or grandchildren should take, see the Schoolchildren and Adolescents section of this site.

What is it that increases the risk of pain in parents or grandparents?

Aside from the factors deriving from pregnancy and labor, the potential risk of having children or grandchildren for the back lies in holding them and carrying them about in your arms. For you, your children or grandchildren are an adorable burden. But for your back, they constitute a burden that is not stable, since it moves about, and which can readily instill bad postures as you attempt to make sure that they do not fall.

Carrying burdens, especially the repeated carrying of excessive burdens, can cause pain in several ways:

Commonly by muscle spasm:

Most commonly the holding or carrying of children or grandchildren aggravates an existing back pain. In such cases inappropriate strain intensifies an existing muscle spasm.

Only if the strain is inappropriate and very intense or prolonged will this produce spasm where this had never occurred before and trigger off a bout of pain.

Regardless of whether a new spasm occurs or an existing spasm gets worse, there is a neurological mechanism that can produce inflammationand cause the pain to persist even after the original cause of the spasm has disappeared.

Exceptionally, holding or carrying a child or grandchild can also originate an actual disorder of the spinal column. Of these exceptional cases, the disorder most commonly produced by carrying an excessive burden is a fissure, protrusion or herniated disc.

At the same time, parents and grandparents are exposed to the same factors that increase the risk of back pain appearing or persisting as the population at large.

Can back pain have harmful consequences?

Not normally. Lifting or carrying your children or grandchildren can produce a new pain or aggravate an existing one, but there are ways of treating this satisfactorily and avoiding ill consequences in the medium and long-term.

There is another section of this site that explains all the common patterns of treatments that have proven effective.

What to do to prevent and treat pain in parents and grandparents?

1. Carry your children or grandchildren in your arms as little as possible. This will be good for your back and even better for the upbringing of the child, who should learn to walk at the earliest possible moment and practice walking as often as possible.

2. When you have to lift or carry a child, observe these rules, which will limit the strain on your back muscles and reduce the risk of producing or aggravating pain.

3. Take exercise to tone up the back muscles. This will enable you to carry burdens - including your children or grandchildren - more easily and with less risk. This site contains a section that describes effective exercises to enhance the strength, resilience or elasticity of the muscles, but you should have a doctor assess your condition before taking up any kind of training.

If you experience pain:

1. Do not restrict your activity if you can help it; avoid only those postures or movements that are too painful. Repose makes the pain worse and prolongs it. On the other hand, if you keep as active as possible, the pain will tend to lessen and disappear more quickly.

2. If the pain lasts more than a few days or is very intense, see your doctor. Avoid getting used to bearing the pain or seeing it as permanent. The longer the pain lasts, the harder it will be to get rid of it.

3. This site contains a section that explains all the treatments there are for back problems and the common patterns of treatments that have proven effective.

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