Children are Scientists

When a willful child meets a broken system

There is a great TED Talk by Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at Berkeley, called How Babies Think. In her talk she says, “Babies are making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they’re revising to figure out how the world works.” In other words, they observe phenomena, create theories, test those theories, revise them, and intuitively follow the one that best fits. They do this every day, repeatedly, from the time they are very young toddlers.

If we take that idea seriously, it changes the way we understand children’s behavior. What often looks like defiance or disorder begins to look much more like experimentation. Children are not simply reacting to the world around them—they are studying it. They are observing patterns, testing boundaries, and refining their understanding of what leads to which outcomes.

Consider a simple experiment from a child’s point of view: what happens when I throw my toys? Maybe nothing happens. Maybe someone says, “Don’t throw your toys.” Maybe someone kneels down and says gently, “I really don’t want you to do that.” Each of these responses becomes a data point. When a child hears, “Don’t throw your toys,” the observation might be that they got their parent’s attention, and they like that attention. When a parent kneels down and speaks gently, the observation might be that they received even more focused attention. Both outcomes are positive, which means there is no real cost to throwing toys.

Over time, the model becomes more complex and more precise. Maybe nothing adverse happens the first five times, and then the toy is taken away. Sometimes the parent says no three times, sometimes ten, but their voice always shifts right before the consequence. The child begins to recognize that pattern and learns that they can continue the behavior until that tone change occurs. This is the conditional probability part—the child is not just reacting in the moment but predicting outcomes based on accumulated experience.

Children are constantly building models of what happens with different people and in different environments. They develop one model for mom and another for dad. They behave one way with one teacher because they have built a model based on one set of experiences, and then go to another teacher and behave differently because they have built a different model there. In this way, children make maps by taking action and observing what happens. If you create simple, consistent patterns, they build clear maps. They want to know what is going to happen.

This is why parents will often say, “My child doesn’t understand that no means no,” but when you watch the interaction, you realize that no does not actually mean no in that environment. It means ask again, or ask the other parent, or wait until the mood changes. Talking, explaining, convincing—all of that does not create a reliable map. Scientists do not want your theory; they want the experiment. They need to see what happens.

This same dynamic plays out in classrooms, often with much higher stakes.

Recently I visited a school that had begun using the Raising Lions approach in the classroom. One of the kindergarten teachers, Nicole, told me she had been using the method effectively—giving breaks, asking children to calm themselves, and then inviting them back to the group when they were ready. While I was there, I watched her give two breaks.

In one instance, a boy named Theo became upset because he felt the break was unjust. As he cried and protested, however, he still walked over to the chair Nicole had designated for the break and sat down. He was fussing and crying in the chair, and Nicole said calmly, “It’s okay. Let me know when you’re ready. But we can’t start until you’re finished crying.” After about thirty seconds—maybe a minute—Theo composed himself, looked at her, nodded, and said, “I’m ready.” He then sat calmly for another moment, returned to the group, and resumed nap time with the other children. The system worked exactly as intended.

But about a week later, when I checked in with Nicole, she told me something had changed. Two days after I left, Theo responded very differently when she asked him to take a break. Instead of walking to the chair, he threw himself on the floor and began screaming that he couldn’t do it. He said he hated breaks and wasn’t going to take one. Nicole didn’t know what to do. She wasn’t allowed to put her hands on him, so she ignored the tantrum and waited for it to stop. The tantrum lasted about ten minutes. Afterward, she tried again to have him take the break, and Theo threw himself on the floor again.

That moment marked the beginning of a much larger problem. The other children were watching, particularly those Nicole had been struggling with—children who were sometimes too physical with classmates or who blurted out mean things. Previously, when she asked these children to take breaks, they had complied. But now they had seen something different. They had seen that refusal was possible, and more importantly, that it worked.

Whenever Nicole asked them to take a break, they began throwing themselves on the floor as well. The pattern repeated itself over and over: a break was assigned, a tantrum followed, and Nicole waited for it to end. After ten minutes, she would try again, only to be met with the same refusal. Before long, no one was taking breaks anymore. After two days of this, she abandoned doing breaks entirely.

When Nicole explained this situation to me, it raised a deeper question. Is this child disordered, or is he smart? And beyond that, is it healthy for the teacher to adapt and change the rules in response to his tantrum?

What we saw in that classroom was not unusual. Children test behaviors. They try things and observe the results. In this case, Theo conducted an experiment, and he conducted it in front of the entire class. He was effectively asking: What happens if I refuse? What happens if I throw myself on the floor? Will the teacher insist that I move, or will the system collapse?

In Nicole’s classroom, the answer was clear. The system broke, and every child saw it happen. This is Raising Lions 101. Children are scientists. Theo gathered data, and the data showed him that refusing the break worked.

So when Nicole asked what she should do, the answer was not to explain more or to convince him. The system needed to give him new data. Not through words, but through what actually happens. Instead of adapting to the child, she needed to follow a pattern the child would have to adapt to—one where the outcome is consistent, predictable, and does not collapse under pressure.

That kind of consistency rarely exists at the level of an individual teacher alone. It requires support. It requires an administrator who will step in when a child refuses, who will back the teacher’s decision, and who will ensure that the outcome holds even when it becomes uncomfortable. It also requires a parent community that considers not only the child who is struggling, but the children whose learning is being disrupted—one that is committed not just to accommodation, but to the conditions that allow a classroom to function. These goals are often framed as being in tension, but they are not. Learning is not zero-sum.

Without that kind of alignment, the teacher is left managing behavior inside a system that quietly undermines her, and children learn very quickly where the system breaks.

Many schools now operate this way. Teachers are asked to maintain order, but the structures around them make follow-through inconsistent or impossible. At the same time, they are encouraged to rely on explanation, negotiation, and emotional processing, even when those approaches appear to only make things worse. The result is not a more humane system. It is a more ambiguous one. And ambiguity breeds more anxiety and defiance.

If we take seriously the idea that children are constantly building models of how the world works—if we really believe that they learn from what happens, not simply from what we say—then the implications are much larger than a single classroom strategy. It means that every lack of action response is not just a missed moment, but a piece of data. It means that systems that cannot hold under pressure will be tested until they fail. And it means that what we often call defiance is, in many cases, a rational response to an environment that does not produce reliable outcomes.

But it also requires something more demanding of us. It requires that we act on the belief that children are capable of adapting to a clear and consistent world. That they can tolerate frustration, meet expectations, and rise to structure when it is real. In a culture where expectations for children are steadily lowered—where fragility is often assumed and accommodated—this is not a small shift. It is a decision to hold a higher view of what a child can do, and to build environments that reflect that belief.

The question, then, is not whether children will test boundaries. They will. The question is whether the systems we place them in are strong enough—and clear enough—to ask something more of them, and to show them that they are capable of meeting it.