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Building on recent efforts to reconceptualize development and socialization as contextually grounded processes, several aspects of Yucatec Mayan children's daily lives are observed, including maintenance activities, social orientation, work, and play. For each category of activity, the behavior of children ranging in age from 0 to 17 is described. Three principles of engagement generated to explain the Mayan cultural context (primacy of adult work, parental beliefs, and independence of child motivation) are used to interpret the descriptive data, illustrating how cultural understanding enables a meaningful interpretation of Mayan children's behavior and how lack of knowledge of these principles could lead to a misinterpretation through a Western cultural lens.

There is increasing concern about declining mental health amongst children in the UK and the USA. Evolutionary and anthropological theorists have begun to build a theory linking this situation to decreasing opportunities to engage in free play. This paper will explore typical contexts for children in these nations, concluding that a range of recently emerging environments have decreased opportunities for collaborative peer free play and ‘discovery’ activities for the current generation. We will draw the theoretical analysis from a broad area of research encompassing psychology, anthropology, education, sociology, marketing, and philosophy to offer a new blend of practical and theoretical perspectives that may shed further light upon this topic.