Lucía Alcalá

Drawing on ethnographic data, this perspective examines the symbiotic relationship between play and household chores in the everyday lives of young Indigenous Yucatec Maya children. Children in this community exercise considerable autonomy in organizing their daily routines, balancing household responsibilities with ample opportunities for unstructured play. This organization of play supports agency, inclusion, and autonomy, and promotes cognitive skills and prosocial development. We further consider how Indigenous communities across the Americas conceptualize household responsibilities and play as one of the same and not necessary as separate activities, and how these cultural frameworks shape children's learning and development. Overall, this perspective advances an understanding of play as culturally situated and challenges Eurocentric assumptions on what children's plays look like, advocating for more inclusive accounts of children's development across diverse cultural contexts.

The study of Executive Function skills, like most research in the developmental sciences, has been heavily focused on the experiences of children from Western, industrialized, highly schooled and middle‐class communities, often ignoring the experiences of the majority of children in the world. When research does include diverse populations, the approach is often from a deficit perspective, looking for ways to “fix” these children's lack of Executive Function skills. In this commentary, I argue for a contextual definition of Executive Function skills to reflect children's lived experiences, including the daily experiences of Indigenous children. I provide examples to illustrate how cultural values such as respect for children'sautonomyand beingacomedida/ocan support the development of Executive Function skills. I then propose how the field of executive function research can move forward by (1) recognizing the broader ways in which children's daily activities can contribute to their Executive Function skills and (2) creating culturally relevant methods to measure Executive Function skills.

Children’s development of executive function is a good candidate for studying cultural differences because it is a necessary capacity for becoming competent participants in cultural activities, and yet it is also likely to be shaped by culturally organized everyday experiences, with potential consequences for children’s development and learning. An ethnographically grounded study with Yucatec Maya children was conducted to explore cultural bias in existing theoretical constructs and methods. Yucatec Maya children autonomously organize their daily activities within a dense web of family social connections and work responsibilities. Yet small pilot samples of 4- to 8-year-olds were uninterested in and performed poorly on many traditional measures of EF due to a number of cultural assumptions inherent in the tasks’ logic and demands. Specific cultural road blocks were identified, including assumptions about motivation, task meaning, rules of social interaction, and specific cultural beliefs. Several novel tasks were then developed, comprised of contextually situated, goal-driven tasks, that children were more motivated to engage in. To check on the accuracy of our analysis we propose a design for a future comparative study consisting of a mix of traditional tasks (both culturally interpretable and culturally inappropriate for Yucatec Maya children), and novel, contextually embedded tasks that were engaging for Yucatec Maya children. We close with a cost/benefit analysis of using culturally meaningful research to study children’s development.

El objetivo de este artículo es describir el papel de la agencia y la iniciativa en el proceso de aprendizaje de los niños mayas yucatecos sobre la salud y la enfermedad. Con base en el paradigma de Learning by Observing and Pitching In (LOPI), se explora la manera en que los niños estructuran ecologías de aprendizaje en las que construyen sus conocimientos medicinales. Empleamos técnicas etnográficas, observaciones y un cuestionario para entrevistar a 22 niños mayas de 7 a 12 años de una comunidad maya del sur de México. Los resultados indican que todos los niños aprendieron el uso y la preparación de múltiples plantas medicinales, además de que monitorean sus propias acciones para mantener su salud; así generan sus propias ecologías de aprendizaje. La iniciativa y la motivación propias para ayudar a los demás a atender su salud tienen un papel fundamental en el proceso de aprendizaje, y, asimismo, su agencia es crucial y respetada.

Culture plays an important role in the development of mental health, especially during childhood and adolescence. However, less is known about how participation in cultural rituals is related to the wellbeing of youth who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), and part of the Global Majority. This is crucial amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a global event that has disproportionally affected BIPOC youth and disrupted participation in rituals. The goal of this paper is to promote advances in clinical child and adolescent psychology focused on rituals. We begin by defining culture and rituals and examining their role on development. We illustrate these issues with the Lunar New Year in China, Maya rituals in México, Ramadan in Turkey, and Black graduations and Latinx funerals in the United States. We discuss how the pandemic has affected participation in these rituals and their potential impact on BIPOC children and adolescents’ mental health. We propose future directions and recommendations for research.

In most cultures, but particularly among Indigenous communities of the Americas, children help extensively with household work. However, less is known about the role of maternal ethnotheories as cultural organizers of the family environment and children's helping. We explored Maya maternal ethnotheories about children's learning to help in two villages. Mothers reported that children learn by observing and pitching in because they have the will and interest and want to help. Mothers help children by orchestrating the setting, supporting their initiative, but learning must be initiated by children. Results support the view of a Yucatec Maya theory of learning and highlight the relevance of studying maternal ethnotheories. As cultural models, ethnotheories guide the organization of the developmental niche, affording children's learning by observing and pitching in and supporting the emergence of their will and interest. Their study may contribute to further acknowledging and supporting cultural diversity.

Service-learning is a high-impact practice that increases students’ engagement with class material and the community. However, a critical lens is needed to strengthen students’ understanding of and commitment to social justice. This mixed-method study examined the impact of a critical service-learning approach, which integrated critical curricula with thirty hours of service to community organizations, on undergraduate students’ orientations towards social justice and civic engagement. Statistical analyses suggested significant differences in social dominance orientation and orientations to civic engagement over time and across three psychology classes using critical service-learning, critical curriculum, and traditional approaches. Qualitative findings from critical service-learning students’ class reflection assignments support a proposed model for the development of a social justice orientation among college students. Over the course of the semester, students shifted from considering social justice as an unobtainable, abstract concept to identifying strategies and expressing willingness to engage in behaviors that lead to social change. This study highlights the potential for critical service-learning to enhance student learning and meet the community’s needs with an awareness of power dynamics and the systemic nature of oppression.

Health guidance during the COVID-19 pandemic led families around the world to spend more time isolated together, disrupting leisure activities, schooling, social interactions, and family work (UNICEF, 2021). Using the lens of Yucatec Maya families’ cultural values and practices, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 18 Yucatec Maya rural women in Mexico (M_age = 32; and for comparison, 13 middle-class European-American women (M_age = 41)), with children 6–7 years old, to analyze families’ experiences during the pandemic. Faced with the same isolation as in the United States, our exploratory analysis revealed Maya families experienced external stresses but at the same time were generally comfortable with their children's everyday activities and their social-emotional well-being, illuminating consequences of the communities’ cultural theories about development.

In light of calls for improving people’s skill in collaboration, this paper examines strengths in processes of collaboration of Mexican immigrant children. Sibling pairs (6–10 years old) in California were asked to collaborate in planning the shortest route through a model grocery store. On average, 14 sibling pairs with Mexican Indigenous-heritage backgrounds engaged together collaboratively as an ensemble, making decisions in common and fluidly building on each other’s ideas, more often than 16 middle-class European American sibling pairs, who on average more often divided decision making into a solo activity (often ignoring the other or simply bossing the other). Siblings who spent more time collaborating fluidly as an ensemble in the shared planning task were also more likely to collaborate with initiative at home, according to their mothers, which suggests that family socialization practices may contribute to cultural differences in collaboration.