If you could do one thing to influence the development of an infant or young child, what would that most important influence be? Or: What is the most important influence on child development? Bard, Keller, and Leavens demonstrate that the cultural community in which the child and family grow up is an absolutely essential answer. Their excellent critique and reanalysis depend on starting with local understandings of cultural beliefs, meanings, and practices, the use of diverse settings and cultural samples, and inclusive comparisons across these cultures and local practices. They use this frame to provide reconsiderations of two (seemingly) previously established developmental theories: shared intentionality theory – redefined as coordinated joint engagement or triadic connectedness (not dyadic joint attention) – and conventional attachment theory.

Underlying this article is the fundamental insight that applies to all conceptions of development: that shaping a whole person engaged in social life in a community is the purpose of childhood development from a cultural perspective. Childhood is a cultural project with goals, moral valence, constant adaptation, and struggle, and the evidence and conceptual frame of this paper show the startling and remarkable varieties of childhoods and cultural contexts found around the world as they affect attachment and shared intention/coordinated joint engagement theories. Furthermore, children are already prepared by evolution as “culture acquisition devices,” to actively discover what that information in their cultural world is like, using many different learning mechanisms – to discover what is safe, dangerous, patterned, and interesting (Konner, Reference Konner2010).

The article also provides a model for how to assess child and family outcomes and well-being in context. True well-being for children in their cultural context is the result of the engaged participation of a child in the cultural activities deemed desirable in that community and the psychological experiences produced by such participation (Weisner, Reference Weisner and Wright2015). In attachment networks, for example, a sense of social trust is an important component of well-being, which cannot only be an individual assessment or one dyadic exchange. This is as true of WEIRD societies as it is of non-WEIRD societies. Exclusive attachment and care by a single maternal caregiver is unlikely to have been selected for in past environments, and the likely alternative then and still today are multiple, socially distributed networks of care (Serpell et al., Reference Serpell, Sonnenschein, Baker and Ganapathy2002), including sibling caretaking. The conventional methods used to describe, measure, and assess attachment are very narrowly defined and bracket out context and cultural meaning just where these should be foregrounded. There are universal features of attachment systems (such as the attachment-sensitive period in children and the stress-buffering roles of privileged caretakers), but these exist within a highly diverse ecocultural world.

This does not mean that evaluations and assessments of relative well-being, and negative and pathological circumstances cannot or should not be made, nor that any local community and context is optimal for children and needs no change and improvements. Such evaluations are important between individuals, within a group, and between cultures. However, local ecocultural circumstances need to be a part of such comparisons (Weisner, Reference Weisner2021a, p. 6).

Bard et al. emphasize several times that by not using diverse samples, local in situ knowledge, comparative evidence, and accepting the implicit bias of WEIRD samples and methods, there is a demonstrated danger of marginalizing the people, cultures, and evidence that do not fit the standard model. The article concludes by pointing to applied work and interventions that rely on culturally-limited concepts, samples, and methods that misapply policies. “Many current fields of application from early education to parenting interventions to legal policies (e.g., custody, child placement) and global early childhood interventions marginalize non-WEIRD samples, rather than taking cultural differences seriously…” (sect. 5, para. 3).

Consider the categories used in the classification of children and their parents/caretakers in standard attachment theory coding using the strange situation (Weisner, Reference Weisner, Cassaniti and Usha2017). There is an inevitable moral valence when using terms such as secure attachment, sensitive parenting, or attuned caregiving and behaviors. These labels (secure, sensitive, attuned), regardless of the reasons they may have been chosen in the past, are not appropriate because their opposites inevitably end up being assigned to the non-Euro-American world or to those less educated and resource-advantaged within a country (LeVine & Miller, Reference LeVine and Miller1990). How can it be justified to characterize individuals, families, and entire cultures and ethnic groups or social classes as insecure, insensitive, and unattuned without careful attention to why caregivers and children are acting as they are and what their opportunities, constraints, beliefs, and goals are in their local environments and communities? Furthermore, the description of WEIRD samples or societies in this way also remains incomplete, in the absence of an account of the cultural/familial contexts that favor this description.

This means, in the case of attachment theory and its evaluative language, that good, appropriate parenting – attuned and sensitive parenting – is not attuned only to the child at hand, focused on that child’s moment-to-moment interactional needs. Good, sensitive, security-enhancing parenting is attuned to the cultural expectations for emotional display, and the kind of person and life goals desired, as well as to the particular child at a given moment. Parents are “attuned” to their cultural learning environment, family, cultural ecology and resources, and other circumstances that matter for sustaining their lives in their local community. Bard et al. show that with qualitative and mixed methods included to understand this developmental project, our field will expand and benefit both developmental science and those we study (Weisner, Reference Weisner2021b).