ABSTRACT
The extensive collaboration and helping often observed among children from Indigenous American and Mexican communities, in both their homes and in research settings, may be based on a value system referred to in Mexico as being acomedida/o, which involves attentive helping without being asked. This cultural value system may encourage children's voluntary, spontaneous assistance to others in family and community work in such communities. In a number of Mexican rural, Mexican-heritage, Indigenous and Indigenous-heritage communities of the Americas, children often provide help as a way to contribute to the larger community or group. Children's helpfulness may relate to community ideologies that treat responsibilities as being shared by the group. In both an Indigenous-heritage and a highly schooled Mexican community, nine- to ten-year-old children viewed household work as a shared family responsibility that children want to take part in. However, it was the children from the Indigenous-heritage community whom mothers reported taking initiative to pitch in to household work.
