Imaging throwing a birthday party for your child. Would you let them open and play with their gifts right away, or would you want to make sure they wrote thank you cards for the gifts first?

In this story, one mom wants to make sure her boys write thank you cards, but the boys would rather play with their favorite toys.

Keep reading to see how they find a loophole in their mom’s rule.

Neighbor shared this with me a few days ago, thought it fit here

So this is a pretty short one, but my neighbor was telling us about how her sons (twin boys, age 7) fell into some malicious compliance in past birthdays.

So once presents were opened, she and her husband always had the rule that they couldn’t play with a gift until the thank you letter for that gift was written.

Seems like a good rule to expedite thank you letter writing.

But the boys were clever!

Until the boys realized they could just write the thank you cards for the presents they wanted to play with and just not even bother writing the thank yous for the gifts they didn’t like.

And she had to make a frustrating rule adjustment that no gifts could be played with until everything was written.

Never underestimate the thought process of a child. They were really smart to realize how to manipulate their mom’s rule, but she was really smart to come up with that rule in the first place and to modify it when she understood the problem.

Let’s see how Reddit responded to this story.

This person would’ve created another workaround.

This person would’ve done something similar.

Here’s a vote for not bothering with thank you cards.

This is true!

Parents need to be very specific when they make rules, or kids will find the loopholes!

If you liked that post, check this one about a guy who got revenge on his condo by making his own Christmas light rules.