How common was it for parents to lose a child? | Hacker News Reader

How common was it for parents to lose a child?

ourworldindata.org

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This is something that struck me when reading Dickens; people died, a lot. One thing it highlights to me is the importance of modern medicine and antibiotics. Another thing is how different the human experience is now for most of the world; children and death are much less common (for most) than previous centuries. Sure this is common knowledge, but taken for granted I believe.

This reminds me of this passing from thhgtth:

"Some may be extremely rich, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of, because nobody is really poor – at least nobody worth speaking of."

> people died, a lot

As always, as many people die, as are born :).

We got better at hiding the fact - by letting people die in hospitals, in homes for elderly (western world) just so it's out of sight and we are less reminded of death. On average, people live longer, yet it's not that they die "less".

One can only lose two parents, but one can lose a lot of children!

If we have a stable population, then a higher child mortality means a higher absolute death rate. If the population is growing, the situation is even more pronounced!

Indeed. The 20th century saw a lot of populations adopt anti-mortality programs before contraception. The population quadrupled in a century. Far more people were born than died!

A hundred years ago, 98% of all people were dead. Today it's only 93%. With some effort, we should be able to reduce that further.

How low can it go?

Asymptotically close to 0

> On average, people live longer, yet it's not that they die "less".

Yes, they do. Previous generations had more children. The higher birth rate did not yield a higher population growth rate, in part because the death rate was also higher. If we had death rates approaching the past, without a similar increase in birth rate, we would be in steep population decline, not the low population growth or slight population decline that most developed countries find themselves in today.

Pardon the seemingly naive idea. How much life is worse when you're shielded from harsh.

I wonder if people weren't more mentally stronger due to the fact that they knew how fragile and dangerous things were. You have to overcome fear and sublimate your existence.

Nowadays I (maybe many others) feel like always wondering if I should dive in the pool.

And the recent VR era is not helping, someone on IRC was complaining that he couldn't be in VR 24/7 so he could just live in it try anything without ever fearing death.

Friend of mine is a nurse who at one time worked in a pediatric cardiac ward. She said babies dying was horrible of course. But watching a teenage former patient die was worse.

Groups countries going through hard times tend to have higher suicide rates, substance abuse, crime rates, violence rates and what not including mental health problems.

So likely not.

Thanks for your answer.

How much is life better when you don't have to burry half of your kids?

You don't get mentally though for that, you just get jaded and even more fearful.

I remember being struck by the fact that most people had teeth go bad and basically rot in place. If you lived near someone with skills they'd grab it with tongs and rip it out, no anesthesia. And this was probably an almost universal experience (for those that lived long enough)

There are some YouTube videos and mini-documentaries of Indian street dentists who have been working for generations. It’s probably as close as we can get to viewing the 1800s or earlier practices.

I don't know that I can find any sources to cite but I once wrote some code for an anthropologist analyzing prehistoric tooth scans, and he mentioned that modern dental carries are substantially more common now than they were in the past because acid producing bacteria thrive on refined sugars that weren't used in modern quantities until fairly recent history.

>acid producing bacteria thrive on refined sugars

The way my dentist put it, and it's stuck with me, is: Tooth decay is caused by the bacteria in your mouth eating sugar and peeing acid.

One thing that shocked me was finding out J.S. Bach had 20 children, out of two marriages.

Of these, 4 died during birth, and 6 died within the first five years.

I can't even imagine what losing ten kids would be like, even if you have ten more.

Not to make light of his loss, but even with ten kids, I marvel at his ability to crank out as much music as he did! I can't imagine any peace and quiet at home for concentration.

Women's domestic enslavement was a wonderful thing.

He apparently only did two things: Compose and have sex.

This is unfortunately not exactly how my own music career went.

He also played organ in cathedral. That was his day job.

Can you imagine that? Going to mass and think the guy playing is pretty good, but then it is Bach?

I mean that is like going to a meeting with your sons HS teacher and it is Einstein.

It was not really commonplace for someone like Bach to have any involvement in raising his children until they were preteens, and then only as an advisor or counselor, not dealing with anything like meals, bathtime, etc.

Then as now, being a musician meant more opportunities to breed.

And of all of those, there are no living descendants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bach_family

I have said for a long time that having a child die is one of the most human experiences (more flagrantly "welcome to being human"). We are fortunate to live in a time where it has become a rarity. Nice to see someone try to put numbers on it.

why do you consider it one if the most human experience?

my interpretation: because it invokes raw emotion and wasn't uncommon.

I think about it this way: until about 3 or 4 generations ago, every single one of my ancestors running back to the time before they were 'human' experienced the loss of a child.

miscarriage is still sadly common, and some of us believe that is a child dying, and it is sad.

We don’t really understand the human condition of the past, even when it is within living memory. A related aspect of life that has been practically eradicated is teenage motherhood. 18-19 years at birth of first child was the most common age for Americans in the middle of the 20th century. 40-year-old grandparents were common. That was just 60 years past, but we view everything differently today.

I wouldn't call teenage motherhood "practically eradicated", at least here in the US. Two of my sisters had kids before they were 18; one is (like me) a millennial, and the other is (I'd reckon) Gen Z. They ain't exactly outliers, either; teen pregnancy is still pretty commonplace, especially in impoverished areas.

Thankfully, my sisters were part of a big family that was happy to share the burden of raising these kids and hopefully allowing them to live happy and healthy lives (and the numerous nieces and nephews I got out of it have been absolute blessings). Not every teenage mother has that resource, unfortunately.

Another aspect of frequent death more than century ago was blended families. A widow or widower usually remarried soon after the mourning period because it was hard for single parents. If both parents passed together, then children were quickly adopted into other families needing labor. Shiffs book on the Salem Witch Trials has a long section on blended families. She attributed that causing some of tensions leading to witch accusations.

I often think about whether or emotions towards our children are affected by our evolutionary past, specifically that since your kids had high mortality, you were smart to not get too close. Interestingly Darwin himself is the case study. I happen to have visited his home and I discovered he lost several kids. But it hurt him as much as you'd imagine, according to his diaries.

You also have to wonder if we have a coping mechanism, for the same reason.

Reminds me that the Inca didn't use to name their children until either 2 or 3 years of age, because of how likely the were to die.

Pretty common to see things like "Child Jones" or "Son Adams" or "Daughter Johnson" or similar placeholders even in Western family trees. Lots of kids wouldn't get names until they were at least a couple years old.

Did I miss something, or does this article say that, for example, if one parent lost 5 children, that means that on average 5 parents lost 1 child each?

It's an interesting topic and the recent bumps on the graph have me wondering what caused young child deaths to rise in the '80s and '00s.

But unless I missed different numbers than averaging all child deaths across all parents, it doesn't answer the question in the title at all.

As a fairly recent father of a toddler, I was a bit hesitant to click the link. It's just one of those things you think about but quickly bury to the back of your mind.

The quotes of grief from the article especially resonated. "Inexplicable" grief comes to mind. Thank goodness for modern medicine, healthcare and vaccinations.

Children are innocent, thoughtful, and full of anticipation for life. The death of a child is a tragedy.

"Here ends the joy of my life" is the proper opening to such a diary entry, and would likely be my words as well.

Unfortunately, we can't inoculate against the random accident. I try to remind myself of this every day as a devotion to be the best dad I can be today for my kids.

From genealogy it appears to me that before the dawn of antibiotics and vaccines all parents had at least some children die of childhood diseases. The only exceptions I find are cases such as where the woman has two children then dies herself in childbirth or shortly thereafter from complications, and both children eventually grow up. Having no dead children a century ago and beyond seems to have been a very rare experience.

The converse is also true: when divorce became easier and more common, there was much hand-wringing over one-parent families, but in the past, one-parent families were just as common. The difference was that it was usually one of the parents had died.

Around here in the Boston area, every town has a colonial-era cemetery, and they are all have a lot of graves of children.

Its interesting to walk in them and read the headstones. The older headstones where I live are for very young children, then there seems to be a gap then it’s young men and women. The males seem to have died in workplace accidents and the women in childbirth.

At the beginning of the 20th century, before antibiotics and safety rules, the top killers were pneumonia, tuberculosis, childbirth, and farm accidents. Yes, work was dangerous.

This thread reminds me of the Frost poem 'Home Burial.'

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53086/home-burial

Judging by families I've known - even if you ignore the still common stillbirths (something that's heartbreaking for those it happens to) - it's still pretty high. My own family lost one, another family I know lost some, know others who lost some too. It's still too common.

I've known too many people who probably wouldn't have survived childbirth either, if it weren't for modern medicine. (particularly including my own mother)

This is all changes within "recent history" - my great grandparents were born before any of this were available.

I came close to dying too, of a disease that now has widespread vaccination. That vaccination wasn't available when I was little, and that disease still kills many where such isn't available - and most particularly children. And one will live the rest of one's life with the complications in a bad case.

Another factor towards the large morbidity rate decline around 1900 was clean water and sewage.

For those desiring an affirmative defence of the Enlightenment; reason, science, and humanism (which I think falls short ethically, but is a subset of what I try to practice), then I would strongly suggest reading "Enlightenment Now", by Steven Pinker. He makes a few broad generalizations of political groups, but I wouldn't try to argue against the specific policy recommendations that he has. Similar data is covered in so many different disciplines that it left me with incredible optimism that I continue to carry.

The decline in child mortality explains why anti-vaxxers are getting footing. They’ve never had to watch a child die from something that was readily preventable with cheap, nearly risk-free medicine.

Not sure if vaccines are relevant here because -- as per the CDC data, and contrary to popular belief -- child mortality rates were on a downward trend well before the introduction of vaccines in the mid 1960s. The CDC claim it's had a "modest" effect:

Infant mortality: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4838a2.htm

Edit: children mortality follows similar trend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality?tab=chart...

Why is CDC research being downvoted?

If I had to guess, because it's about infant mortality but the poster presented it in support of an assertion about child mortality; which of course, it says very little about.

> The reduction in vaccine-preventable diseases (e.g., diphtheria, tetanus, measles, poliomyelitis, and Haemophilus influenzae type b meningitis) has reduced infant morbidity and has had a modest effect on infant mortality

It says infant mortality, which I assume is 0-1 years of age. What about the effect on child mortality altogether?

Infant mortality is probably the biggest factor in "under 5 years old" mortality rate. However, even if you look at children mortality overall, it follows a similar trend: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality?tab=chart...

Note that vaccines were introduced in the late 1700s, not the mid 1960s.

No.

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_vaccines

This is like saying we've been 'programming' since Ada Lovelace wrote the first program in the 1840, which is silly to say the least. The CDC starts measure after a vaccine has passed the 'licensure' process: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6004a9.htm

Programming wasn’t saving thousands of lives in the 1840s. Vaccines were is fairly wide use long before the 1960s. Deaths from smallpox dropped sharply though the 1800s and it was eliminated entirely in many countries.

I think you're missing a basic understanding of what an "analogy" is. Hard to keep this conversation going.

Programming had essentially zero real-world impact before the 1950s. The analogy you’re trying to make is that vaccines existed but had virtually no real world impact before the 1960s. Did I get that right? Because that’s what I understood, and it’s severely wrong.

I think its misleading to equate what was available then - both in quality and quantity - with what has been available in the modern world for the last 70 years.

I think it’s misleading to act like vaccines weren’t saving kids’ lives until my parents’ generation.

I think it's fair to say that the uptick in lives that were saved made a huge leap forward with the arrival of industrialized medicine which is to say mass produced vaccines made available to the many and of course the arrival of vaccines for even more diseases that were not previously covered.

I hope we can agree that the recent down tick in the rate of vaccinations is a step backwards.

I’m not sure about that. The death rate from smallpox was unbelievably high before the vaccine, and it was eliminated or nearly so in many countries well before this supposed 1960s date.

Certainly more recent advancements have been wonderful, and the anti-vaux movement is callously throwing away lives and the hard-fought victories of our ancestors.

The statement about "modest" effect was, by my reading, about the 1990s, and the link to the study "[9]" seems to verify this.

"Although improvements in medical care were the main force for declines in infant mortality during the second half of the century, public health actions played a role. During the 1990s, a greater than 50% decline in SIDS rates (attributed to the recommendation that infants be placed to sleep on their backs) has helped to reduce the overall infant mortality rate (8). The reduction in vaccine-preventable diseases (e.g., diphtheria, tetanus, measles, poliomyelitis, and Haemophilus influenzae type b meningitis) has reduced infant morbidity and has had a modest effect on infant mortality (9)."

9 = https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/PDF/wk/mm4629.pdf

I'm confused by your post. Did the original comment suggest that vaccines were the only cause of this trend? The comment even states that "They’ve never had to watch a child die from something that was readily preventable with cheap, nearly risk-free medicine," which doesn't only include vaccines. In either case, vaccines for certain things like polio were being used before 1960, https://www.historyofvaccines.org/index.php/content/us-polio..., so I don't understand your comment.

> Did the original comment suggest that vaccines were the only cause of this trend?

Did I say they said that? They brought it up and I simply said it's largely irrelevant.

> vaccines for certain things like polio were being used before 1960

From the CDC:

> Before 1962, no formal nationwide immunization program existed.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/su6004a9.htm

It's not largely irrelevant because this discussion isn't about how much of an effect vaccinations had on child mortality rates.

You either cherry picked that quote or you missed the sentence right after that which talks about private practices and local health department programs. Look at the source I linked, please.

So is it your position that things would go just fine if we followed the anti-vaxxers advice?

I didn't even say anything against vaccines. Simply, it's not the primary driver of decrease in childhood mortality. You're blinded by ideology if you can't have a conversation with resorting to name-calling and reductios.

No, I didn't say that's your position, I asked.

The reason I asked is your position that vaccines are of minimal importance for childhood mortality is one the anti-vaxxers take, but I am aware that doesn't prove you are one, so I asked. And I am happy to learn you are not an anti-vaxxer.

I think where your mind is going is a form of Mccarthyism or "guilt by association." In a public conversation, connecting someone to a label like "anti-vaxxer" or "truther," even if you don't make the actual accusation is a form of slander. Then holding someone intellectually hostage and saying "I'm glad you're not X," as if I'm beholden to what you think of me, is sleazy to say the least.

You might not be doing this consciously, but you are doing it nonetheless.

Well, ok, you're right. I should have said something more like, "you are presenting an argument that is normally made by anti-vaxxers, so that makes me think you are one. But perhaps I am completely wrong about that." Or maybe said nothing at all.

typo in the title : "was it was"

Thanks! Fixed.

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