Laziness
I have never been a believer in a child’s ability to be lazy. My belief is that all children want to do their best and perform well. And a parent calling their child lazy is actually the parent being lazy.
Children’s brains are wired to learn and grow and do. All children with healthy bodies and brains learn to speak, walk, write, etc. The learning and growing never stops. As a child goes through life learning things, they encounter obstacles to mastering the things they are learning.
As parents, it is essential to give our children the chance to fail and let them know we believe in them and their ability to accomplish what it is they are trying to learn.
Doing things for our children, they have not learned to do on their own, makes them afraid of failing as they get older. They don’t learn that failure is a part of mastering something. They never learn to believe in themselves when things get difficult. And as teenagers and then as young adults they are unwilling to try new things or experiences because they become paralyzed with the fear of failure.
This is one way a child becomes “lazy”. Ultimately, it is not the child’s fault. It was the parent taking accountability away from their child and assuring success (temporarily) so the child doesn’t “lose” or feel bad because they couldn’t master their learning.
Another way a child can be perceived as “lazy” is when they are actually depressed. When Blayne was 17, my father died. 9 months after he died, I began to notice Blayne was sleeping a lot and not doing the things I asked him to do on a regular basis. He spent a lot of time in his room. Instead of getting mad at him and saying how lazy he had become (an easy thing to think since he was in the middle of his gap year after high school), I sat him down, let him know I was seeing a pattern of behavior that was odd for him and asked him what he thought it was about.
After a few back and forths he burst into tears and told me he was really struggling after his grandfather died and hadn’t been feeling anything at all since his death. No sadness, no grief, no happiness, no joy. It was difficult some days to get out of bed and he had nothing to be excited about since he wasn’t feeling his feelings. He hadn’t talked to me about it because I was going through my own grief process.
Once we talked it all the way through, he felt much better and started feeling his feelings again. He stopped sleeping so much and he found joy in things he loved to do again.
The third kind of “lazy” is what some refer to as selective laziness. This is the most common with children with Asperger’s. They are perceived as lazy when they aren’t pushing themselves or trying harder to do better in certain subjects at school or with extra-curricular activities.
The thing to understand here is the person with an Asperger’s brain is so overwhelmed with input and has no capacity for filtering or censoring what the input is, that when they encounter a situation that is uninteresting to them, they are able to tune everything out. In this case, the person is not lazy but, simply, not interested. And nothing can motivate a person with Asperger’s who is uninterested.
With my son, when he had a subject in school that was uninteresting to him, I shifted my expectations to match his enthusiasm for the subject. And I learned to be happy with Cs. He did really well in all the other subjects and I knew in college, he would be able to choose the classes according to his interests.
Believing it impossible for a child to be lazy, makes any perceived “laziness”, a symptom of something bigger. It becomes a sign to dig deeper and find out what is really going on with your child. In the end, your child also learns the signs themselves and is able to understand when they need to take a look at themselves if they see a tendency towards “laziness” as an adult. And they are able to be compassionate towards themselves because you were.
