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.

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.

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.