Lazy Is As Lazy Says

I hate the word “lazy.”

It’s just a pejorative. You see someone not doing something or not doing a good job at it – and you call them lazy. It’s something I overhear parents say to children all the time and it makes me so mad.

Call a child, or anyone, “lazy,” and what have you accomplished? You’ve labeled their behavior, sure, but all that label means is “shithead.” So, you’ve made them feel even worse about themselves than they already do – because doing what you are supposed to do is usually the least painful path – but you have done nothing to help and a lot to hurt.

It boggles my mind that people can look at a child who isn’t doing his schoolwork, is failing, and say, “Oh, he’s just lazy,” as if this kid could do the work but isn’t just cuz. How can you possibly think that a kid fails in a class, looking stupid in front of his peers, his teachers, his family, plus, now, he’s failing and that’s a big problem, because he wants to? Some parents even seem to think that the kid is doing it specifically to make them angry. That’s like saying that someone “chooses” to be gay to make his or her parents mad.

Sure, sometimes a kid who is failing will act the class clown or pretend that failing is cool, sometimes whole groups of them will do that, but that’s just a ruse. It’s a whole lot harder and more terrifying to publicly try your hardest and risk failing than it is to not try at all and pretend that’s cool.

When someone isn’t flying right, it’s because there’s a reason – and frankly, the only one being lazy (not to mention, mean) is the one who calls them lazy.