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.
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).
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.