Imagine your family is having dinner and you tell your 8-year-old who is playing a game on her tablet, “No electronic devices at the table.” She complies by putting the device on her lap, and continues to use it to play. This scenario is an all-too-common example of how kids use loopholes.

A loophole is an intentional misunderstanding, when a request is technically satisfied but the underlying spirit is not. Although using loopholes is common in law, history and everyday life, no one had studied how and when kids start to pick up on this type of communication and begin to use loopholes to evade rules without outright disobeying, until recently.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University took a deeper dive into kids' use of loopholes, examining how, when and why they use them.

Children expect loopholes to result in less trouble than outright defiance.

The team asked 260 parents in the U.S. to report on their children's behavior with respect to loopholes. In total, the researchers followed 425 kids.The study focused on children 4-10 years old; 42 percent were female. The researchers also asked the children to evaluate loopholes, predict when someone will use them and come up with loopholes of their own.

After analyzing the data, the team concluded:

  • Children expect loopholes to result in less trouble than outright defiance.
  • While not all children use loopholes, and not all of them develop their use at the same time, children's understanding and use of loopholes appear to emerge around age 5 to 6 and then peak at age 7 to 8.
  • Kids thought loopholes were funny. They smiled and laughed more when they heard stories about loopholes than when hearing stories about children doing what they were told or outright refusing to do so.
  • Children under 5 struggled to come up with ways of being sneaky, but from 5 to 7 years of age, kids were increasingly able to devise valid loopholes on their own.

Kids often used creativity to skirt an instruction. For instance, if a child is told not to use a computer, they use a tablet. Or told not to eat any more gummy bears, they switch to gummy worms.

There were a few surprises. “One thing that delighted and surprised me was the creativity and wittiness of children's loopholes, which can be seen in the parent anecdotes we collected, and also the more official experiments we ran,” Kiera Parece, a co-author of the paper and graduate student in the Early Childhood Cognition Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained in a press release.

“We saw that children engage in loopholes across a wide range of domains. It's not just “oh, they learned what the word “can” means, so now they can use a loophole that involves ‘can,'” Parece added.

Kids often used creativity to get around an instruction. For instance, if a child is told not to use a computer, they use a tablet. Or told not to eat any more gummy bears, they switch to gummy worms.

The researchers hope their research sends the message for teachers and caregivers that loopholes can be creative and funny. They are not just something one child does, but something a lot of kids do; and they are the cornerstone for a behavior we all see as adults.

In addition, the researchers say their observations and data on loopholes can be helpful in understanding how intentional misunderstandings emerge. This may hopefully form a foundation for how to avoid them in cases where we want to avoid them, or how to use them in cases where we want to encourage them for their wit and playfulness.

The study focused on children 4-10 years of age, omitting the full spectrum of the developmental picture. In the future, researchers hope to work with toddlers and teenagers in order to get a fuller story.

The study is published in the Society for Research in Child Development journal, Child Development.