<p>The burden of heavy school bags among primary and secondary schoolchildren has emerged as a persistent public health and educational concern in Pakistan, yet existing research has largely prioritized biomedical and quantitative perspectives, with limited attention to parents’ lived experiences and interpretative meanings. This qualitative study explores how parents perceive, interpret, and respond to the physical, emotional, and social impacts of heavy school bags on their children. Using an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 40 parents of school-going children enrolled in both public and private schools across urban and semi-urban areas of Punjab, Pakistan. Interviews focused on parental observations of children’s physical strain, emotional distress, and perceived institutional responses. Data were analyzed iteratively following IPA guidelines, enabling an in-depth examination of shared experiential patterns while preserving idiographic sensitivity. The findings reveal that parents commonly associate heavy school bags with visible physical discomfort, fatigue, reduced playtime, and emotional distress, alongside feelings of parental guilt and helplessness. Schools were frequently perceived as normalizing children’s pain through rigid curricular demands and inadequate infrastructural support. Parents adopted various household-level coping strategies; however, these efforts were constrained by structural and institutional barriers. The study highlights how socio-economic position, gender norms, and school type shape parental interpretations and responses. By foregrounding parental voices, this research contributes to a more holistic understanding of the school bag burden as not merely a biomedical issue but a socially embedded and institutionally mediated experience, underscoring the need for coordinated educational, health, and policy-level interventions.</p>