How Children in a Maya Village Do Chores
<i>&quot;The Mexican-American kids, aged 6 to 7, were doing about twice as much around the house as the middle-class European-American kids, on average,&quot;</i><p>It&#x27;s implied but not outright stated in the above quote: We are talking about households that are much, much poorer on average than &quot;middle-class European-American kids.&quot; This is backed up by the photos in the article.<p>So, if you have nothing else to do because your parents don&#x27;t have the resources to supply you with a TV, a video game system, a tablet, a computer, a cell phone, etc ad nauseum, then you can either sit around twiddling your thumbs and dying of boredom or you can involve yourself in whatever the nearest human is doing as a means to occupy yourself.<p>The other piece of that is that poorer cultures wind up naturally more people centered than richer cultures, which wind up more thing centered. When my kids were little and we didn&#x27;t have much, they learned to take turns and share not because of some kind of cultural magic, but because we didn&#x27;t have a lot of stuff, so they basically had to share. In a family wealthy enough to have one of X for each and every family member (or whatever), then you don&#x27;t need to learn to share or take turns. You just use your thing and leave their thing alone.<p>I&#x27;m all for promoting more real involvement with kids so they are better socialized, etc. But I think there are very big problems with acting like culture evolves separate from material wealth and details like that.