Nobody calls a child with a broken leg lazy for not running. But we’ll call a child with a reading difficulty lazy for avoiding books, a child with executive function difficulties lazy for losing their homework, a child with social anxiety lazy for not speaking up in class.
I don’t use the word. Not because I’m being precious with language — though I am that too — but because every time a child has been called lazy in my office, what we’ve actually been looking at was a child working twice as hard as the kid next to them to do the same thing. Lazy is usually what we call effort we can’t see.
If it looks like laziness, it almost always isn’t. It’s usually exhaustion, avoidance of shame, a strategy that’s stopped working, or the wall where one skill outruns another. The interesting question is never whether a child is lazy. It’s what they’re carrying that we can’t see yet.