We develop a discrete version of paracontrolled distributions as a tool for deriving scaling limits of lattice systems, and we provide a formulation of paracontrolled distributions in weighted Besov spaces. Moreover, we develop a systematic martingale approach to control the moments of polynomials of i.i.d. random variables and to derive their scaling limits. As an application, we prove a weak universality result for the parabolic Anderson model: We study a nonlinear population model in a small random potential and show that under weak assumptions it scales to the linear parabolic Anderson model.