ABSTRACT
The agrarian cultural traditions of Asia, Africa, Oceania and Latin America are still the most widely used guides to the purpose of life, the nature of human development and the relations between individual and society. An 'agrarian culture' is a collective organization of ideas shared by an agrarian population, in which some of the basic premises are derived from the routines of their productive and reproductive lives. Though hardly uniform in their institutions, agrarian societies resemble each other in the economic and demographic conditions of family life, which are accompanied by broadly similar moral codes for parent-child relations and similar cultural models of the life span in which parenthood symbolically occupies the central place. The phenomena of child labor and natural fertility show that agrarian families operate under economic and demographic conditions that give them a common interest in prolonged child-bearing and the raising of obedient children, leading to some common assumptions about parenthood and parent-child relations.
