Why do children do what it is not suggested?

Brain has a limited storage capacity of information. Influx news come from a number of sources and brain does information selection and it retrieves when needed. In children context, it is a common phenomenon in which they go to in different direction or do something that is banned or uninstructed. It seems that prohibition ends up with enforcement or encouragement. Over quantity of information that the children required affects how children perceive messages delivered by their interlocutor. 

Children make 'mistakes'. The quoted word is intentionally made to highlight that its definition falls into parents' perspectives towards what conducts considered to be proper or improper. Generally speaking, the older the people get, the more they are more aware of social norms. Consequently, the children are socially expected to behave accordingly. The problems, however, is that children have not fully understood what social expectations are. What the parents considered to be inappropriate could be something fun for children to try. 

Responding to children's mistakes, parents or caregivers tend to explain what, why, and how their conducts are false. Reactions displayed are manifested by long elaboration. They believe that children will understand their long elaboration as they are considered to be comprehensive. The fact, however, is that parents' instruction, expectation, or information provided are gone so easily. The question is that why it is so. 

How information processed can be seen from a number of approaches: context-dependent models, exhausted-access models, and ordered-access models. The first notion asserts that context decides access so as to only appropriate meanings become active (Schvaneveldt, Meyer, & Becker, 1976). For example, children will activate more quickly two related meanings of salah (mistakes) with jangan (no), instead of unrelated word such as harus (must). The following illustrates the conversation between the two:

    Children    : Bajuku kotor gara-gara main pasir. 

    Parent        : Makanya jangan main yang kotor-kotor terus. Aku kan udah bilang, kalo main jangan di tempat kayak gitu. lihat, bajumu baru aja ganti, sekarang harus ganti lagi. Bolak balik tak bilangin, tau SALAH, tetap aja dikerjain. JANGAN main ke situ lagi y..

The above script of conversation exemplifies how the second part of the conversation (parent) offers a lot of information about what should or should not do. Due to huge information that the child receives, the child's brain can fail to pick up the essential information or point that the parent actually wants to emphasize. Why Parents do not stick on the main point that they really want their children do (for example, MAIN DI RUMAH AJA, instead of jangan main ke situ lagi y..).

Furthermore, exhausted-access models assume that all meanings of ambiguous information are firstly accessed in accordance with context affecting only later selection processes (Onifer & Swinney, 1981). Once most of prohibitions comes later, the latter would play a significant role in a way that the child recalls the information so that rules like 'enforcement', it then becomes automatic responses that the brain processes. 

Ordered-accessed models, however, believe that frequency has a strong contribution to child's memory. Not context that influences to what extent the information is processed or activated, but how frequent information exposed or received. Since the level of prohibition, instead of suggestion or (direct) instruction), frequently appears, it is then understandable why only prohibited information that processes faster. Consequently, the child perceives the information in different way; the child does not follow what his or her parents want him/her to do. In this context, it can be said that the children basically do not perform inappropriate conducts, but simply because the information processing factors that affect their understanding of the huge information that they receive. It is the way how brain selects information and how words by words are understood and how social expectation grasped by the children in their ages.