Why is my child so lazy?

Teenagers can seem annoyingly lazy: they might be slow to respond when we talk to them, distracted, slow to get up in the morning, slow to lay the table (if they get there at all), slow to sit down to do their homework… It’s easy as a parent to think all these signs of laziness are caused by the same underlying trait. Some parents put it down to hormones and puberty, some to a lack of self-discipline, some to a character defect in their child such as “being a lazy person”.

Partly this is a mental shortcut. We all take them: we’re driving at the speed limit on the motorway and someone overtakes us? We’ll put it down to the driver’s character – “what a numpty” we’ll think. That’s because we can’t really spend time analysing everyone’s behaviours and trying to understand each person’s situation. Sure, we know deep down that the speeding driver may have a good reason for speeding: maybe their wife has just gone into labour and they’re trying to get to the hospital in time for the birth of their child; maybe they’ve got a flight to catch but got stuck behind a traffic accident earlier on the road. Attributing negative behaviours to a person’s character is easier however, and a lot of the time there’s no real harm done by it. So we continue.

When it comes to our own children though I would argue that it’s worth spending a little more time to look at the underlying causes. Why might someone look lazy? Let’s ask ourselves what they are actually doing: they are avoiding a situation by trying to move as slowly as possible towards it. School might be inevitable but by staying in bed a little longer they’re putting off that inevitability. Homework will eventually have to be done but by lounging on the sofa and browsing their phone they’re putting off the moment when they will eventually have to face Mr Smith’s maths problems. What looks like laziness is really procrastination, and procrastination is very often caused by anxiety

We have all procrastinated due to anxiety: if you have a phone call you’re dreading it’s easy to find excuses such as ‘I’ll just wash the dishes first’ or ‘I can’t possibly call while that car alarm is making a racket outside’. If you need to have that difficult conversation with your boss you’ll keep a lookout for the moment when they’re in a good mood, and when that moment comes you’ll think that actually it’ll probably be better if you catch them on a Friday afternoon, and when Friday afternoon comes you discover that *oh, no* your boss is in a meeting and won’t be out for ages and you’ll have to leave the conversation until the following week. How dreadful.

Our children are the same: if maths them anxious, they’ll avoid it. If they’re worried about going to school, they’ll often linger in bed or spend ages in the shower so as to put off the moment when they will have to face the inevitable. Of course, there may be other issues causing this apparent laziness or actual procrastination, but anxiety is a common one. The anxiety might be caused by previous failures, excessive expectations, social problems at school or a number of other factors, and identifying that factor is the key to getting to the root of the problem.

Getting to the root of the problem is important because if left unchecked this low-level anxiety can create far greater problems. The Anxious child avoids work or leaves it too late to make a good job of it, and in so doing ends up in a vicious cycle. The bad job on the work means they get a bad mark for it and this gives them an even greater reason for avoiding the same kind of work next time. In their own minds they have received confirmation that they were indeed right to be anxious about the work – “you see?” they’ll say to themselves, “I was right to worry because I did badly in it as I’d thought I would”.

To break the cycle we need to understand and address the causes of the child’s anxiety, giving them the opportunity to succeed at work they had previously avoided. This is where Academic Coaching can help. Tutoring a child in a specific subject may sometimes be useful to address their anxiety – after all they will momentarily succeed in that subject – but that is often not enough to address the cycle. Academic Coaching will identify the source of their anxiety, challenge the beliefs underpinning it, and give the child the cognitive tools to dismiss their anxiety. This is a transferable skill too, so the child will stand a better chance of standing up to anxiety in future, and will have learnt a skill for life.