Don’t do it. Don’t ever call your adolescent “lazy.” This label is more psychologically and socially loaded than most parents seem to understand. To make matters worse, the term is usually applied when they are feeling frustrated, impatient, or critical with the teenager, which only makes insulting injury from this name-calling harder to bear.
“Lazy” can have a good meaning when it is seen as the exception and not the rule, when it is seen as earned and not undeserved. “Having a “lazy day,” for example, can mean rewarding oneself and laying back and relaxing with no agenda except doing very little and enjoying that freedom from usual effort and work very much. When “lazy” is treated as the rule, however, calling someone a “lazy person,” then the working worth of that individual has been called into question. And “lazy” always attacks “work.”
