7 ms·

All the people talking about being unable to handle/comprehend the death of their child, and especially the one line of conversations about the impact of losing

All the people talking about being unable to handle/comprehend the death of their child, and especially the one line of conversations about the impact of losing one child when you have many more, made me think about something. For most of human history, losing some children was expected. Child mortality rates for most of our history have been abysmal. As species, what impact did that have on us? Child abuse has a long history of being accepted, with child sacrifices in some cultures to forced marriages of children (not to say any of these events were super common, but there were cultures in which they were accepted even if not common). Look at 16th to 18th century and what happened to orphans of single mothers and it is horrible by modern standards. In some cases orphans were treated as child slave labor or worse (granted, they would grow out of it if they survived, while with actual slavery it was for life). Even into the 19th and 20th century we had children working in factories where dismemberment was all too common. But around the start of the 20th century, that started changing, and today harming a child is one of the worse things that a person can do. Many would quicker forgive an ex convict that killed a rival gang member than someone who intentionally seriously injured a child. I wonder if this is at all tied to drops in child mortality rates.

JauntTrooper 9y ago
I think the pain of loss was just as severe, and the past was just more miserable than we think. Someday our children and descendants will look back at our time period in horror at the atrocities we continue to allow happen globally. 300,000 children under 5 die every year of malaria. The extensiveness of the agony that causes is difficult to comprehend.
- dwaltrip 9y ago
  > I think the pain of loss was just as severe, and the past was just more miserable than we think. Why would the pain be equivalent, despite the vastly different context: life experiences and expectations, cultural details, worldviews, etc? To be clear, there are many aspects/phases to the pain of loss. I can imagine that the initial suffering may be very similar, but that the integration/processing of the event in subsequent months and years be significantly different. That's not to say that, overall, it wasn't worse back then, but I'm guessing the pain from a single loss event might be noticeably different due to the vastly different context.
baxtr 9y ago
My mother lost one of her siblings (a small boy of 4) 65 years ago. She still talks about it and becomes very sad. I think life was just much much crueler and a lot lot worse than it is today.
- BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  65 years ago is after the change happened. Part of the problem is I'm talking so long ago that everyone who only knew that reality. Maybe we could look at some place overall isolated from the rest of the world where child mortality throughout the society is similar to centuries ago, but with globalization I'm not sure that is possible because even in places where it is extremely high now, the local wealthy would have access to ways to lower it and in many places the child mortality rate hasn't been sustained at that level (if you look at the child mortality rates in Yemen, the levels is something new caused by the war).
  - jiggunjer 9y ago
    Families were bigger, less emotional investment per capita. Human life, in as far as an economist can quantity it, was objectively worth less too. Nowadays we are highly educated value creators.
jasonswett 9y ago
Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined addresses most of this stuff. Super interesting book. Seems like things were super horrible in the past. It seems that most people think the world is getting worse and more dangerous over time but the opposite is true.
smitherfield 9y ago
>Many would quicker forgive an ex convict that killed a rival gang member than someone who intentionally seriously injured a child. When has this ever not been true? People instinctively (and reasonably[1]) consider crimes to be more serious where the victim is more sympathetic or vulnerable, and vice-versa. [1] Though they might be unreasonable in their sympathies and/or assessments of vulnerability, like a misogynist who always assumes female accusers are liars, and claims a woman punching a man is as serious as the reverse. Or, the identity of the victim might engender unreasonable, emotional reactions: a jury might vote to convict despite the prosecution not proving the case, or the evidence pointing to a tragic accident, because the victim was a child.
- BearGoesChirp 9y ago
  >When has this ever not been true? In the past before child abuse became seen as a big deal. Granted, if you hurt the child of some wealthy/powerful individual it was considered bad, but children of the poor, and especially children of single mothers were offered no where near the status they are given today. Just look at societies where infanticide was common place to see that harming a defenseless child wasn't considered that bad an action (especially in cases where the child was showing signs of having developmental issues, I've read about there even being mythology that developmentally delayed children were treated as if the real child had been replaced by some demonic like figure who was being left to die/killed). Or consider societies where children were effectively property of their parents (namely their father) and he could do as he liked to them? Look at cultures where children were forced into marriages, something that would not be accepted today. Yes, people vastly overestimate how often such marriages happened (especially when at least one was young), but it was still far more tolerated when it did compared to today. Even in the last few years we have a few countries who still have laws on the book that reduced/removed punishment for a rapist if they married the victim. This historically applied even when the victim was a child (the Bible even has two passages that require such a punishment, one for when the child hasn't hit puberty (where the father can void the marriage) and one where the child has (where the father cannot void the marriage). Or just look at a society that sacrificed children.
  - 9y ago
triangleman 9y ago
Didn't earlier societies value the life of elders more than children, because they had a life of experience and wisdom that was lost?
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
I was at a funeral recently, for an older person, but the same thought about losing lots of children very young came to me. Possibly inspired by the location, I wondered how much of religion was designed around somehow making sense of the death of children.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  Until recently babies weren’t even destined for heaven, they went to limbo. It took an update being in 2007 for this feature to be added. The people who come up with this crap hardly ease suffering. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1549439/The-Pope-ends-state-of-limbo-after-800-years.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1549439/The-Pope-e...
  - misiti3780 9y ago
    heaven and limbo are christians concepts - if you are not a christian/catholic[1] (aka 6/7 of the world) and you find out a child dies, you presumably dont even give these things a second thought. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2007/04/the_end_of_limbo.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
    - lostlogin 9y ago
      I was replying to a comment discussing heaven. But even without that it’s about a billion people and the HN crowd are not representative of world population. It would be interesting to see the demographics...
chasd00 9y ago
It's biological, at the end of the day, there's nothing more valuable than the lives of your offspring. It's a common theme throughout all of life not just humanity. The most primal and greatest loss possible by a living thing is the death of its offspring. Humans being human are uniquely equipped to suffer in this regard.
pnathan 9y ago
Yes, there has been a substantial shift. I found the book "Cherubs, Chattels, Changelings" to be a good treatment of the difference. Suffice it to say, we have a very unusual society today, compared to the arc of human history.
naasking 9y ago
> All the people talking about being unable to handle/comprehend the death of their child, and especially the one line of conversations about the impact of losing one child when you have many more, made me think about something. For most of human history, losing some children was expected. Child mortality rates for most of our history have been abysmal. Exactly, the preciousness of childhood and children in general is a more modern trend. Certainly our ancestral parents felt the loss, but not nearly so keenly because they still had to focus on feeding the rest of the family. And it is absolutely related to the drop in child mortality. Falling child mortality leads to less need to have fewer children since they're more likely to survive. This leads to families with fewer children (a trend seen world-wide), and each family invests more heavily in the children they have. It very much looks like loss aversion and the sunk cost fallacy.
- lostlogin 9y ago
  > Certainly our ancestral parents felt the loss, but not nearly so keenly Having recently read a few accounts of early European settlers in New Zealand, nothing about their accounts would make me think that they felt the loss less keenly. New Zealand was colonised by Europeans relatively recently but older accounts of loss don’t make me think any loss was somehow less either. I’d agree that the loss was less unexpected. Unsure how you would measure this effect though.
lifeformed 9y ago
Well, there are still currently regions of the world where high child mortality is common. Stories from those areas might provide some insight on what you are wondering.
PostOnce 9y ago
I think it's mammalian, not just human. We've felt a loss that's hard to describe all throughout history. Just because it was common doesn't mean it hurt any less. Here's the description of a man losing his son, from Beowulf, a thousand years ago: (lines 2444-2464 of Heaney's translation) ----------------------- It was like the misery felt by an old man Who has lived to see his son’s body Swing on the gallows. He begins to keen And weep for his boy, watching the raven Gloat where he hangs: he can be of no help. The wisdom of age is worthless to him. Morning after morning, he wakes to remember That his child is gone; he has no interest In living on until another heir Is born in the hall, now that his firstborn Has entered death’s dominion forever. He gazes sorrowfully at his son’s dwelling, The banquet hall bereft of all delight, The windswept hearthstone; the horsemen are sleeping, The warriors underground; what was is no more. No tunes from the harp, no cheer raised in the yard. Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed And sings a lament; everything seems too large, The steadings and the fields. Such was the feeling Of loss endured by the lord of the Geats After Herebeald’s death.
icc97 9y ago
Having less children is a factor. I only have one child with no chance of a second. If I lose the one there is no concept of a future. If you have more than one child there is a future because you have to carry on for your other children.

JauntTrooper 9y ago

I think the pain of loss was just as severe, and the past was just more miserable than we think. Someday our children and descendants will look back at our time period in horror at the atrocities we continue to allow happen globally. 300,000 children under 5 die every year of malaria. The extensiveness of the agony that causes is difficult to comprehend.

dwaltrip 9y ago
> I think the pain of loss was just as severe, and the past was just more miserable than we think. Why would the pain be equivalent, despite the vastly different context: life experiences and expectations, cultural details, worldviews, etc? To be clear, there are many aspects/phases to the pain of loss. I can imagine that the initial suffering may be very similar, but that the integration/processing of the event in subsequent months and years be significantly different. That's not to say that, overall, it wasn't worse back then, but I'm guessing the pain from a single loss event might be noticeably different due to the vastly different context.

baxtr 9y ago

My mother lost one of her siblings (a small boy of 4) 65 years ago. She still talks about it and becomes very sad. I think life was just much much crueler and a lot lot worse than it is today.

BearGoesChirp 9y ago
65 years ago is after the change happened. Part of the problem is I'm talking so long ago that everyone who only knew that reality. Maybe we could look at some place overall isolated from the rest of the world where child mortality throughout the society is similar to centuries ago, but with globalization I'm not sure that is possible because even in places where it is extremely high now, the local wealthy would have access to ways to lower it and in many places the child mortality rate hasn't been sustained at that level (if you look at the child mortality rates in Yemen, the levels is something new caused by the war).
- jiggunjer 9y ago
  Families were bigger, less emotional investment per capita. Human life, in as far as an economist can quantity it, was objectively worth less too. Nowadays we are highly educated value creators.

jasonswett 9y ago

Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined addresses most of this stuff. Super interesting book. Seems like things were super horrible in the past. It seems that most people think the world is getting worse and more dangerous over time but the opposite is true.

smitherfield 9y ago

>Many would quicker forgive an ex convict that killed a rival gang member than someone who intentionally seriously injured a child. When has this ever not been true? People instinctively (and reasonably[1]) consider crimes to be more serious where the victim is more sympathetic or vulnerable, and vice-versa. [1] Though they might be unreasonable in their sympathies and/or assessments of vulnerability, like a misogynist who always assumes female accusers are liars, and claims a woman punching a man is as serious as the reverse. Or, the identity of the victim might engender unreasonable, emotional reactions: a jury might vote to convict despite the prosecution not proving the case, or the evidence pointing to a tragic accident, because the victim was a child.

BearGoesChirp 9y ago
>When has this ever not been true? In the past before child abuse became seen as a big deal. Granted, if you hurt the child of some wealthy/powerful individual it was considered bad, but children of the poor, and especially children of single mothers were offered no where near the status they are given today. Just look at societies where infanticide was common place to see that harming a defenseless child wasn't considered that bad an action (especially in cases where the child was showing signs of having developmental issues, I've read about there even being mythology that developmentally delayed children were treated as if the real child had been replaced by some demonic like figure who was being left to die/killed). Or consider societies where children were effectively property of their parents (namely their father) and he could do as he liked to them? Look at cultures where children were forced into marriages, something that would not be accepted today. Yes, people vastly overestimate how often such marriages happened (especially when at least one was young), but it was still far more tolerated when it did compared to today. Even in the last few years we have a few countries who still have laws on the book that reduced/removed punishment for a rapist if they married the victim. This historically applied even when the victim was a child (the Bible even has two passages that require such a punishment, one for when the child hasn't hit puberty (where the father can void the marriage) and one where the child has (where the father cannot void the marriage). Or just look at a society that sacrificed children.
- 9y ago

triangleman 9y ago

Didn't earlier societies value the life of elders more than children, because they had a life of experience and wisdom that was lost?

ZeroGravitas 9y ago

I was at a funeral recently, for an older person, but the same thought about losing lots of children very young came to me. Possibly inspired by the location, I wondered how much of religion was designed around somehow making sense of the death of children.

lostlogin 9y ago
Until recently babies weren’t even destined for heaven, they went to limbo. It took an update being in 2007 for this feature to be added. The people who come up with this crap hardly ease suffering. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1549439/The-Pope-ends-state-of-limbo-after-800-years.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1549439/The-Pope-e...
- misiti3780 9y ago
  heaven and limbo are christians concepts - if you are not a christian/catholic[1] (aka 6/7 of the world) and you find out a child dies, you presumably dont even give these things a second thought. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2007/04/the_end_of_limbo.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/20...
  - lostlogin 9y ago
    I was replying to a comment discussing heaven. But even without that it’s about a billion people and the HN crowd are not representative of world population. It would be interesting to see the demographics...

chasd00 9y ago

It's biological, at the end of the day, there's nothing more valuable than the lives of your offspring. It's a common theme throughout all of life not just humanity. The most primal and greatest loss possible by a living thing is the death of its offspring. Humans being human are uniquely equipped to suffer in this regard.

pnathan 9y ago

Yes, there has been a substantial shift. I found the book "Cherubs, Chattels, Changelings" to be a good treatment of the difference. Suffice it to say, we have a very unusual society today, compared to the arc of human history.

naasking 9y ago

> All the people talking about being unable to handle/comprehend the death of their child, and especially the one line of conversations about the impact of losing one child when you have many more, made me think about something. For most of human history, losing some children was expected. Child mortality rates for most of our history have been abysmal. Exactly, the preciousness of childhood and children in general is a more modern trend. Certainly our ancestral parents felt the loss, but not nearly so keenly because they still had to focus on feeding the rest of the family. And it is absolutely related to the drop in child mortality. Falling child mortality leads to less need to have fewer children since they're more likely to survive. This leads to families with fewer children (a trend seen world-wide), and each family invests more heavily in the children they have. It very much looks like loss aversion and the sunk cost fallacy.

lostlogin 9y ago
> Certainly our ancestral parents felt the loss, but not nearly so keenly Having recently read a few accounts of early European settlers in New Zealand, nothing about their accounts would make me think that they felt the loss less keenly. New Zealand was colonised by Europeans relatively recently but older accounts of loss don’t make me think any loss was somehow less either. I’d agree that the loss was less unexpected. Unsure how you would measure this effect though.

lifeformed 9y ago

Well, there are still currently regions of the world where high child mortality is common. Stories from those areas might provide some insight on what you are wondering.

PostOnce 9y ago

I think it's mammalian, not just human. We've felt a loss that's hard to describe all throughout history. Just because it was common doesn't mean it hurt any less. Here's the description of a man losing his son, from Beowulf, a thousand years ago: (lines 2444-2464 of Heaney's translation) ----------------------- It was like the misery felt by an old man Who has lived to see his son’s body Swing on the gallows. He begins to keen And weep for his boy, watching the raven Gloat where he hangs: he can be of no help. The wisdom of age is worthless to him. Morning after morning, he wakes to remember That his child is gone; he has no interest In living on until another heir Is born in the hall, now that his firstborn Has entered death’s dominion forever. He gazes sorrowfully at his son’s dwelling, The banquet hall bereft of all delight, The windswept hearthstone; the horsemen are sleeping, The warriors underground; what was is no more. No tunes from the harp, no cheer raised in the yard. Alone with his longing, he lies down on his bed And sings a lament; everything seems too large, The steadings and the fields. Such was the feeling Of loss endured by the lord of the Geats After Herebeald’s death.

icc97 9y ago

Having less children is a factor. I only have one child with no chance of a second. If I lose the one there is no concept of a future. If you have more than one child there is a future because you have to carry on for your other children.