March 27, 20255 min readLet Kids Be Little LawyersFinding Loopholes Can Sharpen Their Social SkillsA new study finds that when young kids find loopholes, or sneaky work-arounds, for instructions, they must apply advanced social and language skillsBy Charlotte Hu edited by Lauren J. Young"Im not alone, Ive got my trusty sidekick!" Emilija Milenkovic/Getty ImagesMany parents will find this scenario familiar: Tomer Ullman, a parent and a cognitive scientist at Harvard University, told his then five-year-old to put down a tablet. But instead of putting it away completelyas Ullman actually wantedthe child set the device down on a table and continued to watch videos on it. Ullman remembers being upset but intrigued by the behavior.He and his fellow scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, some of whom shared similar parenting experiences, were inspired to investigate childrens exploitation of language loopholesinstances in which kids technically do what adults ask of them but completely violate the true intent of the request. Sometimes these common alternative interpretations are purposeful mischief; at other times, theyre an honest misunderstanding. But research shows that some young children seem to use them as a genuine way to avoid orders without getting into trouble. The new study, published in Child Development, suggests that such clever rule-bending behavior may actually show that a child is starting to better understand languageand other people.Cognitive scientist and co-lead study author Sophie Bridgers had previously analyzed how children decide to help others, a key element for social interactions. But cooperation is not always black and white, especially when kids and adults have conflicting goals. Theres actually this whole gray area in between, says Bridgers, who was a postdoctoral researcher at M.I.T. when the new study was conducted and is now a researcher at Google DeepMind. Sometimes you dont want to cooperate, but it might feel risky to outright refuse. We started to be curious about the strategies [kids] used to handle this tension. Hearing anecdotes from Ullman, who is senior author of the new study, and other parents led Bridgers to investigate whether loopholes might be one such strategy.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.Bridgers and her colleagues surveyed 260 U.S.-based parents to get a sense of how widespread loophole-finding behavior was in their children. Many parents shared rich examples of loopholesfor example, a child who was told to hold hands when crossing the road held their own hand instead of their parents and a kid told not to go outside alone took the dog with them instead of waiting for an adult.The seeming universality of the loopholes reported by parents demonstrates that the behavior can be generalized to a range of real-world situations. That parent survey led to a series of follow-up studies, the first of which evaluated a separate set of 108 children aged four to nine to find whether they considered loopholes to be a compliant or noncompliant behavior, or a middle ground between the two. The researchers had the kids read a story and judge how much trouble the child in the scenario would get into if they used a loophole. An additional follow-up study examined another group of 140 children aged five to nine to determine their ability to create a loophole for a given scenario on the spot.The multianalysis report revealed that four-year-olds were unable to distinguish loopholes from noncomplianceparticipants thought that the kid in the story would get into the same amount of trouble whether they used a loophole or entirely disregarded a parents requests. But participants aged five to eight appeared to view loopholes almost as a way to get off on a technicality; they understood what the parent was asking for and how the child used a loophole to take advantage of the lack of specificity in the command. This age group viewed loopholes as a way to get into less trouble than noncompliance. The age range is also when parents see their children gradually using more loopholes, Bridgers says.There are social norms and rules that children are learning around eating, play, their house chores, homework, bedtime, personal hygiene, Bridgers says. Theyre testing all of these boundaries.The researchers found that kids could reliably come up with loopholes quickly on demand by age eight, with their skill increasing between age five and seven. The ability to understand the intended meaning behind words and derive alternative or multiple meanings from a phrase are language skills that strengthen in children between the ages of five to seven, Bridgers adds. These skills not only allow kids to use loopholes but also let them grasp more complex figures of speech such as irony, metaphor and sarcasm.Being able to infer the implied meaning and context from indirect requests, as well as using metaphors and puns, tend to require a higher order of language development, says Laura Wagner, a professor of developmental psychology at the Ohio State University, who was not involved in the study. According to Wagner, this is the first time Ive seen anybody actually looking at children genuinely exploiting loopholes and demonstrating that not only do they understand that theres a double meaning [in what their parents may be saying] but what the social implications of that are, she says.Wagner thinks the cognitive skills needed to find loopholes are similar to those used for lying, which is also an advanced language skill. Children under the age of three or four are notoriously bad liars because they really are bad about figuring out what other people actually know, she says.Kids get better at lying around the same age that they get better at coming up with loopholes. Bridgers suggests that could be because other cognitive skills develop in parallel in early childhood. This includes the emergence of theory of mind, the point at which children really start grasping the idea that other people have their own set of beliefs and representations of reality. Additionally, children begin to use their inference of others beliefs, goals and perspectives to calculate the costs and benefits of their actions.Planning actions that take not only [a childs] own goals but other peoples goals into account are potentially related to loophole behavior, Bridgers says.Parents may not appreciate having a child who is good at lying or is constantly circumventing orders. But this does show that theyre integrating lots of language knowledge [and] social knowledge, Wagner says. Plus, these activities are acts of creative problem-solving.These are all behaviors that we have in our social tool kit, Bridgers says. Lying is one way to get around conflicting goals; partial compliance is another way.Its not always such a bad thing for children to act like little lawyers, as Bridgerss team refers to kids who employ such behaviors. After all, these children are learning to navigate inherently ambiguous social interactionsand having fun with it.People have a lot of ways to communicate beliefs and goals: through language, actions, subtle subtext and a myriad of cultural cues and social norms. Thats a noisy system where information can be lost, Bridgers says. Recognizing how loopholes work can get you thinking differently about the way that you communicate and negotiate with others.