Is my child just being lazy?
Posted on September 2, 2015
Is My Child Just Being Lazy or Are They Experiencing Learned Helplessness?
Often people hear the word “anxiety” and assume it’s a negative emotion. The reality is that all emotional states have their place and anxiety in small doses can actually help academic performance. If a student (young or old) experiences a mild level of anxiety toward a test for example, they are more likely to study for the test and make a real effort to do well in the test. This usually leads to improved grades. Where academic anxiety is not helpful is when it’s frequent or excessive.
Anxiety is an uncomfortable emotion. It’s our brain’s way of telling us to be cautious, or that action may need to be taken. In the time of cave men anxiety would have been experienced as a way of keeping people safe, people would have felt anxious in an unfamiliar environment so as to be alert for danger. Many millennia on, our brains still work the same way. There may not be sabre toothed tigers anymore but our brains still tell us to be prepared for any perceived danger.
When we experience anxiety most of the time we will do whatever we can to stop feeling that emotion. For some people that’s tackling whatever it is head on (fight), for others it’s to retreat to perceived safety (flight), for others still the result is to do nothing, to stand perfectly still and wait for the danger to pass (freeze). All of these reactions are normal and serve their purpose.
When someone experiences anxiety all the time, for example a child experiencing academic anxiety everyday at school, these reactions start to look like something else. The child who goes into fight mode can appear to have behavior issues and the children who resort to flight or freeze can appear to be lazy, disinterested or disengaged. The reality is that despite what the behaviour looks like on the outside the child is simply acting in a way that makes sense to them, in all probability, especially for young children, this may be the only option they believe is open to them as they don’t see any other way of being in that moment.
The danger is that after a period of time (there is no set amount of time, each person is different) if they are unable to find a healthy way to manage their emotions, if they are unable to find the support from family or teachers, if they are unable to find ways to learn and fit in the child may develop learned helplessness. This is basically where the child perceives that they are helpless in any given situation. Once they perceive that they are helpless to change their circumstances a child will often give up. Why would they keep trying if they don’t perceive that there is hope?
Academic anxiety and learned helplessness can be easily dismissed as laziness. If we dismiss children who are struggling in this way as lazy then we miss the opportunity to help them to turn their limiting self-beliefs around and by doing so we miss the opportunity to help them to discover their full potential.