Is My Child Struggling, or Just Not Trying? How to Tell the Difference

Elizabeth has been tutoring privately and in schools for nearly five years, working across a wide range of subjects with students at GCSE and A-Level.

She is passionate about helping students rebuild confidence and find their way back into learning. Her greatest success to date was helping a student improve from a U to a B in A-Level History.

Here, she draws on her experience to help parents understand what is really going on when a child disengages from school.

Struggling or Lazy: Identifying Your Child's Real Issue and What to Do About It

By Elizabeth | GCSE and A-Level Tutor | Sherpa Tutor

Parents contacting a tutor generally circle around a single question long before reaching out: Is my child struggling or lazy? In either case, the child shows low commitment and engagement in school, with homework left until the last minute and generally poor performance in class. Teachers' remarks like "capable but not applying himself" do not clarify matters and leave parents wondering whether they are seeing a lazy child or a struggling one.

The trouble is that these situations require opposite approaches. A struggling child needs help, while a lazy child may need consequences, but the question becomes even more complicated, as both approaches can do more harm than good. Thus, the problem is that it is extremely difficult to distinguish between a struggling and a lazy student, because from the outside both cases look identical.

Why avoidance looks like laziness

Students avoid topics that make them feel incompetent. This is a natural human response, and there's nothing wrong with it, except that students try to mask their struggle with avoidance. If homework always makes a child feel stupid, they will prefer to do anything else instead, from tidying a desk to playing computer games. The result is a student who seems not to care about their academic success. This is why effort is not the best measure of engagement in school. Usually, when effort stops showing up, it means something went wrong earlier and the child stopped making an effort to avoid the pain.

This is why, instead of asking about the level of effort put into homework, you should try asking some other questions.

Four things to consider

Is it a single subject or all subjects?

The student who avoids one subject but reads for pleasure and earns good grades in another is telling you a lot about their situation. Motivation usually doesn't work selectively, but difficulties do. Avoidance of a specific subject almost always points to problems with that subject, including weak foundational knowledge, a strained relationship with the teacher, or poor results in previous tests that changed the child's perception of the subject.

However, when the student avoids everything at school, the problem is usually somewhere outside the classroom.

Did it happen suddenly or build gradually?

If the avoidance appeared suddenly (in October everything was fine, but in February you don't recognise your child anymore), there is likely a specific cause behind it. Some important event happened to the child: they switched their friend group, moved to another set, or a diagnosis revealed itself when the workload became too big.

Gradual decline is usually the result of accumulated knowledge gaps. In subjects that build on prior knowledge, like GCSE Maths and GCSE English, this becomes most obvious. A child who lost a couple of weeks of lessons in Year 8 may continue doing everything well for some time until one day they hit the wall in Year 10 - but then the problem looks like disinterest and is, at its core, arithmetic.

What happens when you make the task easy?

This question can be extremely helpful in understanding whether the child struggles or just doesn't want to put effort into their homework. Sit down together and give the child a simple question two years below their level. No pressure and no audience.

The child who is capable but disinterested will do it quickly enough and with a condescending smile. However, the child who struggles will often be hesitant with something you considered automatic. Such hesitations are the best indicators of a problem.

How does the child speak about the subject?

"I find this subject boring" and "I'm not good at it" seem to be two different statements, but in most cases the first is just the socially safer version of the second.

Listen for absolutes: "I'm not a maths person." "I have never been good at writing essays." "I don't get it, and I never will." This is not indifference; it is a conclusion made about oneself.

Underlying issues

When disengagement is observed in a capable student, the problem is likely to be one of the following things:

Knowledge gaps from previous years

Especially for subjects that assume some skills and knowledge gained earlier. The child isn't struggling with the material of Year 11 but with the material of Year 9 wearing the clothes of Year 11.

Unnoticed special educational needs

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia often go undiagnosed, especially when the student is bright enough to cope for years before the workload becomes too big. The student who can't start working on the task, loses concentration during the process, and produces work that doesn't reflect their knowledge can't be accused of laziness. Girls are usually diagnosed late because an inattentive presentation does not disrupt the lesson.

Anxiety 

Some children avoid revision just because it means facing the fact that they know almost nothing about this subject.

Everything else 

Sleep, friendships, mobile phones, and events at home. Teenagers usually do not say this directly, and academic withdrawal may be the first visible sign of the problem.

Having the conversation without making it an argument

In most cases, the conversation fails in the first sentence, and the first sentence in most cases is an accusation in the form of a question. However, there are several tips that help a lot in having a successful conversation.

Ask about the task instead of asking about the effort. What part of this work bothers you? This is easier to answer than "Why haven't you done it?" Find the exact point where the child stalls: opening the book, writing the first sentence, getting stuck in the middle of the essay. "I can't start" and "I lose it halfway" are different problems that require different actions.

And you must be ready to accept a partial answer because teenagers often can't explain what is wrong with the task. They may have constructed an entire story to avoid admitting that they cannot do it. Your goal for the first conversation is not a diagnosis, but creating conditions that allow them to say "I don't understand it" aloud.

When tutoring is helpful and when it is better to contact the school first

One-on-one tutoring has its strengths in dealing with a very specific type of problem: gaps, a dropped subject, and the need to regain confidence through success.

An effective tutor will take some time in their first lesson to find out what the real understanding gap is, and it turns out that in many cases this has occurred years before anyone expected. One-on-one tutoring also eliminates the audience, and for a student who has already stopped participating in class discussions, this can make an immediate difference.

First, talk to the school if withdrawal happens in all subjects, if it occurs with changes in mood, sleeping habits, or social life, or if you think there is an unrecognised learning difficulty. The situation requires testing and coordination rather than an additional weekly hour. Tutoring without diagnosing the problem treats the symptom.



These two situations are not mutually exclusive, and often the truthful answer to the initial question is "both." A student who struggles too much will eventually become unmotivated, as trying and failing is even more unpleasant than not trying at all. This is not a discipline issue. This means that the work is no longer manageable, and the solution is to make it manageable again.