\nHonestly weirder than the fact that more than half the groups of elementary schoolers walking home past my window are walking with parents is that those parents often have their own backpacks. What do they have in there?
Briefcases are a more adult-professional-coded way to carry random useful things (or at least this was the case in the white-collar world of the mid-20th-century), but a backpack is a more versatile and probably more effective way of carrying random useful things, especially now that computerization has reduced the percentage of random useful things an adult with elementary-school-aged children might carry that are paper documents.
in my experience briefcases went out of fashion a long time ago, i associate briefcases with my grandfather, occcasionally still used but rarer among my parents generation. in current adult contexts i see backpacks, the other option is the one-shoulder laptop bag/messenger bag type thing
Yeah, the trend had seemed to be that men too were using shoulder bags
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