Change is slow and elusive. Well-meaning cross-cultural collaborations still reproduce colonial patterns. For the WILD approach to be transformative, it must move beyond a mindset and toward procedural changes that promote equitable and respectful conditions. The WILD approach must resist creating a false dichotomy with WEIRD and acknowledge that culture is alive and globalized.

Lew-Levy and Amir begin to identify mechanisms through which peer interactions can drive cultural change. We highlight an additional important mechanism: peer disagreement. We propose that the egalitarian and learning-oriented nature of peer disagreements prompts children to reflect on the limitations of their knowledge, and to evaluate and integrate competing perspectives, thereby providing fertile ground for the co-creation of new insights.

We fully endorse the authors’ aim and conclusions that we must move toward a deeper and more representative developmental science. We disagree with the authors’ interpretation of the evidence to support their claim. We propose a more inclusive approach to science with a focus on development in action.

This brief commentary offers another source of evidence for the arguments made in the target article. The lives of street kids are usually seen as deplorable, as a social blight that must be eradicated. But ethnographic literature can turn this shibboleth on its head. Scholars like the authors have forced us to see the enormous capacity that autonomous children have for acquiring, transmitting, and creating culture. Street kids provide an excellent illustration of this argument.

Lew-Levy and Amir highlight children as agents of cultural adaptation and widespread presence of peer cultures across populations, but their account underestimates peer culture in East Asian societies. Drawing on East Asian contexts, we show how strict family, school, and social structures lead peer culture to take on more covert forms, underscoring the need for broader cross-cultural perspectives.

This commentary extends the WILD framework to societies undergoing rapid industrialization and globalization. We demonstrate how children in these societies form close attachments to extended kin and non-kin members, consistent with local cultural values and modern societal demands and in contrast to the core assumptions of attachment theory. These caregiving ecologies showcase the functional plasticity of the human developmental system.

Language differs from other cultural domains in its high degree of normativity and conventionality; hence, many linguistic innovations by young children are considered acquisition errors that do not diffuse into language communities. Moreover, young children’s cognitive-pragmatic limitations hinder their ability to introduce structure into novel communication systems. Consequently, children are unlikely agents of language change or drivers of language emergence.

We advocate for decolonizing developmental theory beyond sample expansion. Using attachment theory as an example, we demonstrate how current theories misrepresent even Western populations, where allo-parental care is a necessity. We argue that focusing on adaptive challenges, not behavior, will support open-ended theories with universal relevance. This requires reflexivity, transparency, and centering indigenous methods prior to proposing any universal developmental mechanisms.

Innovation does not occur in all environments. Rather, it is a cultural product of particular socioecological conditions, for example, schooling and commercial activity. Tool innovation is a product of cognitive development. It requires a developmental process that enables concrete cognition around age eight and abstract cognition in the teenage years. These conclusions arise from long-term study of textile production in a Maya community.

Bard et al.’s WILD framework calls for cultural inclusivity in developmental science. We argue for extending this framework to neurodiversity, emphasizing equifinality and individual differences. Including neurodivergent populations enriches developmental theory and avoids harm caused by neurotypical benchmarks. A truly inclusive science must recognize developmental pathways that vary by culture and neurotype as valid and meaningful.

Children’s natural curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and future orientation predispose them for cultural adaptation. I exemplify this with Sugata Mitra’s “hole in the wall experiment,” adolescents’ role in the computer revolution, and the likely role of play in children’s development of Nicaraguan Sign Language; and I give an example of juvenile play resulting in cultural innovation in Macaques.

Bard et al. call for increased inclusivity in developmental science. In agreement with this need, we highlight the need to examine the origins of our developmental theories. We build on their work by demonstrating that a failure to examine the metaphysical commitments to culture within our theories can lead to erroneous assumptions as well as constraining research on development.

While Bard et al.’s WILD framework commendably calls for broader inclusivity in developmental science, it underestimates the challenges posed by migration. Migrant children’s lives complicate the constructs of local and in situ, demanding their reconceptualization as fluid and multi-sited. Recognizing this complexity is important for advancing culturally robust developmental theories.

The target paper brings a new dimension to cultural evolution research. The findings it reports are consistent with the hypothesis that it is integrated cognitive networks – i.e., ways of structuring knowledge – that evolve through culture, as opposed to discrete units of cultural knowledge. The impact of child peer groups on cultural evolution could be modeled using methods from network science.

Bard et al. rightly call out Western-centric bias to champion Worldwide, in-Situ, Local and Diverse developmental research. Yet this inclusivity must be grounded in evolutionary theory to model development. Comparative evidence strengthens accounts of shared intentionality and attachment. Integrating within-species variation through WILD with between-species variation engaging evolutionary perspectives will offer more robust explanations of universal and diverse developmental pathways.

In this commentary I critique individualist biases in developmental and cultural evolutionary science, highlighting the need to study children’s peer cultures as relational and culturally situated. Emphasizing perspectives from the Global South, I call for a genuinely inclusive framework that integrates non-Western developmental theories into the core of cultural evolutionary research.

Children’s peer cultures hold the potential to drive cultural evolution, depending on demography and social transmission pathways. Understanding their interactions can inform cultural-evolutionary theory and promote adaptable cultural institutions. Here, we outline the next steps for theoretical models, clarifying the importance of peer cultures, and introduce sustainable behavior as a compelling test case for children- and youth-driven cultural change.

This commentary explores the shift from WEIRD to WILD psychologies, showing how a focus on cultural diversity and meaning-making aligns with this movement. Using examples, we argue that the epistemic recognition of Global South realities is an urgent act of justice – one that frees psychology from its colonial imagination and opens space for many ways of knowing, caring, and becoming human.

Crowd-sourced replication initiatives reveal that cultural differences in findings, while undoubtedly important in some cases, are often smaller and less systematic than assumed. This makes empirical testing, rather than presumption, exigent. The extent to which developmental psychology theories generalize across cultures is an empirical question, best answered via small- and large-scale collaborations between partner laboratories across the world.

Lew-Levy and Amir note that by adolescence, children shift from speaking like their parents to using the vernacular of their peers, suggesting that children attend closely to linguistic input from other children. But unlike adult input, peer input has been neglected in research. We believe this is due to methodological limitations that long-form audio recordings are uniquely equipped to overcome.