This is the conclusion I lean towards, but anecdotally one of my grandparents knew something like 3 or 4 kids who died before the age of 15, all in preventable

This is the conclusion I lean towards, but anecdotally one of my grandparents knew something like 3 or 4 kids who died before the age of 15, all in preventable accidents. Disease got at least a few more. It’s possibly just a coincidence but hearing the stories of how inattentive people could be to their children back then, I’ve always suspected current helicopter parenting norms must have accounted for at least some of the decline. There’s been a similar shift with people letting their dogs roam free. When I was a kid I remember hearing stories about a dog getting run over by a car every year. I rarely hear these stories anymore because people usually keep their dogs supervised or in a fenced yard. I don’t have any hard data, but I suspect there’s something to these cultural shifts.