We focus our review on three universal tasks of human development: relationship formation, knowledge acquisition, and the balance between autonomy and relatedness at adolescence. We present evidence that each task can be addressed through two deeply different cultural pathways through development: the pathways of independence and interdependence. Whereas core theories in developmental psychology are universalistic in their intentions, they in fact presuppose the independent pathway of development. Because the independent pathway is therefore well-known in psychology, we focus a large part of our review on empirically documenting the alternative, interdependent pathway for each developmental task. We also present three theoretical approaches to culture and development: the ecocultural, the sociohistorical, and the cultural values approach. We argue that an understanding of cultural pathways through human development requires all three approaches. We review evidence linking values (cultural values approach), ecological conditions (ecocultural approach), and socialization practices (sociohistorical approach) to cultural pathways through universal developmental tasks.

Psychology has considered the development of learning, but the development of teaching in childhood has not been considered. The data presented in this article demonstrate that children develop teaching skills over the course of middle childhood. Seventy-two Maya children (25 boys, 47 girls) ranging in age from 3 to 11 years (M = 6.8 years) were videotaped in sibling caretaking interactions with their 2-year-old brothers and sisters (18 boys, 18 girls). In the context of play, older siblings taught their younger siblings how to do everyday tasks such as washing and cooking. Ethnographic observations, discourse analyses, and quantification of discourse findings showed that children's teaching skills increased over the course of middle childhood. By the age of 4 years, children took responsibility for initiating teaching situations with their toddler siblings. By the age of 8 years, children were highly skilled in using talk combined with manual demonstrations, verbal feedback, explanations, and guiding the body of younger learners. Children's developing competence in teaching helped their younger siblings increase their participation in culturally important tasks.

Against the background of an unchanging sequence of representational development, we demonstrate that implicit processes of learning and cognition can change from one historical period to another. One generation of Zinacantec Maya children was studied in 1969 and 1970, the next generation in 1991 and 1993. In the intervening two decades, the community, located in Chiapas, Mexico, was involved in a transition from an economy based primarily on subsistence and agriculture to an economy based primarily on money and commerce. A naturalistic study of weaving apprenticeship and an experimental study of visual representation showed that the ecological transition was linked to greater emphasis on independent cultural learning, abstract representation, and innovation, and, correlatively, a movement away from scaffolded guidance, detail-oriented representation, and imitative representational strategies. These changes constituted automatic adaptations with an implicit nature. In addition, historical variability in implicit modes of cultural apprenticeship predicted shifts in implicit processes of child and adolescent cognition. In sum, socialization and development are not fixed but adapt, in a coordinated way, to changing ecological conditions.

The authors report a diachronic investigation of cultural apprenticeship, creativity, and cognitive representation in a Zinacantec Maya community of Chiapas, Mexico. Focusing on the culturally central domain of weaving, they explore the implications of an ecocultural transition from agriculture to commerce for learning and development. Their studies cover 24 years and explore the implications of historical change in two generations of Zinacantec Maya children. The first wave was studied in 1969 and 1970. The next generation was studied in 1991 and 1993; it comprised mainly daughters and sons, nieces and nephews, and godchildren of the first generation. The results show that in the space of a single generation, weaving apprenticeship moved from a more interdependent to a more independent style of learning, woven textiles changed from a small stock of defined patterns to widely varied and innovative patterns, and cognitive representation of woven patterns became less detailed and more abstract.

This article explores the social and cognitive implications of sibling caregiving among the Zinacantec Maya of Mexico and the Wolof of Senegal. Ethnographic video data of sibling caregiving interactions were collected, focusing on children ages three to 13 years interacting with their two‐year‐old siblings. Sibling relations in both cultures reflect a system of multiage play, the children's sensitivity to age and gender hierarchies, and the older siblings'role as teachers of their younger siblings. Differences in the two groups include more verbal exchanges and wordplay with the two‐year‐old Wolof children and more overt efforts by older Zinacantec siblings to incorporate the two year olds into their group activity. The data indicate an overall pattern of cultural transmission by which older siblings teach younger ones in the context of caring for them. The pattern is nuanced by each group's social organization and rules for social interaction, exhibited in the children's play.

Additional work is needed to learn more about the challenges that caregivers of youth with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders are facing, as well as to develop empirically based strategies for helping these caregivers and their dependents.

In recent decades, Maya ecocultural environments in Chiapas, Mexico, have undergone continuous change from more subsistence based to more commerce based and from more rural to more urban. Through ethnographic observations of one family during a 10-year period in rural and urban settings, activity settings analysis revealed changes on the micro level that reflected these shifts in the macro environment. The development of commerce between 1997 and 2007 led to increased reliance on technology, increases in individuation and individual choice, specialization for economic tasks, and for women, more formal education. Other changes in this period that were greatly intensified by urban dwelling included contact with strangers, contact with people of different ethnicities, and women’s economic achievement. Urban dwelling also introduced freedom for young women to have unchaperoned contact with young men.

Each culture defines the appropriate ways for people to use their bodies (Mauss 1934). In this paper we examine the uses of the body in a technical skill, that of Zinacantec Maya backstrap loom weaving. We hypothesize that native learners of weaving are different from non‐native learners in that they are endowed from birth on with the biology and cultural experience needed for weaving. Maya newborns have distinctive patterns of motor behavior and visual attention. These patterns, reinforced by cultural experience, are utilized when girls learn to weave, highlighting the interplay between culture and biology. Non‐native learners do not begin life with the same patterns of motor behavior or cultural experience and thus begin the acquisition of the body techniques involved in the complex skill of weaving with a deficit. Conclusions are based on an empirical, historical study of two generations of girls learning to weave in Nabenchauk, a Zinacantec Maya hamlet in Chiapas, Mexico.