"It's laziness"

The label arrives at the third Thursday, and it feels like a diagnosis. Lazy. Not a description of the morning, a description of the child.

Ask what laziness would have to mean for a nine-year-old. It would have to mean that he can do the thing and prefers not to, in order to avoid effort. So look at the effort. Remembering a kit takes no effort if you have the shelf for it, and considerable effort if you don't, and chapter 3 is about which one a nine-year-old has. A child who forgets the kit isn't avoiding effort. He's failing at something that would cost an adult nothing and costs him more than he's got at twenty to nine.

The NHS, in its guidance on difficult behaviour in children, says that often the reason is simply that the child is tired, hungry, overexcited, frustrated or bored. It's a list written for younger children and it holds at nine. Look at the letdowns on your list from chapter 1 and mark the time of day. In my experience most cluster at two points, the morning before breakfast has settled and the evening after a day's school, and those are the points where a child's executive functions, in Diamond's account, are most impaired, because tiredness and hunger impair them in everyone. The child who can't come off the tablet at half past seven is a child at the end of his resources, and the word for that is tired, and tired is a state that passes, where lazy is a character that doesn't.

That's the trouble with the label. It predicts nothing. A child who's lazy on Thursday should be lazy on Saturday, and Sam will spend Saturday morning building something in the garden with an attention that would shame an adult. Laziness that switches off for Lego isn't laziness. It's a mismatch between the task and the child's current equipment, and the mismatch is worst for exactly the tasks the standard is about, the dull, adult, self-directed ones.

And the label produces something. A child called lazy learns that his parent thinks he's lazy, and that's a fact about the parent that he stores, and chapter 17 is about what he does with it. It doesn't get the kit in the bag. Nothing about the word makes Thursday better. It's a verdict on a morning that's already gone, delivered to the one person in the house who couldn't have made it go differently.

Drop the word. Not because it's unkind, though it is, but because it's inaccurate, and you're a person who cares about that.