Man, as a parent this chills me. Before modern medicine the statistics of deaths in childbirth were scary.
The reason that there's no word for people who lost a kid is because until yesterday every family lost a child. The word for someone who lost a child was "parent".
Grief over losing a child is not entitlement, or weakness, or being spoiled. It's grief, as raw and human as it's always been.
It used to be normal for children to die in the mid-1800's-England. Something like 25% of children born didn't make it to their first birthday.
Today, that number is more like 0.34%.
I suspect the difference is that in the 1800's it happened a lot. You weren't the only one. You had people who were empathetic. Nearly any person you'd come in contact with likely had either experienced the same trauma, or loved people who had. That doesn't mean people didn't grieve over the loss. It just meant that living with the grief of a lost child was normal.
In "modern" times? If it happens to you, you're an outlier. Not only are you grieving the loss of your child, you're alone. No one you know has also lost a child. You're grieving the loss of potential, the legal garbage, insurance, funeral costs, you're doing it either with your partner, also grieving, or alone (or maybe worse, with a partner, but still "alone"). The amount of times you'll hear "I can't imagine what that must be like" help reinforce that feeling of being alone, because it's simply true. It's unimaginable. It was for me, and even having experienced it, still is.
Whether it's the 1800s or 2000's, humans are resilient. While losing a child often does lead to depression and divorce, we can heal from these things. We have an advantage over 1800s parents in that we have huge support networks that are no further away than our pockets that blow away whatever community support might have existed in the 1800s. Not to mention medicine and advances in our understanding of human psychology.
Grief isn't weakness. Grief is simply human.
And this is why we will disagree. What, by your definition, does "ruin one's life" actually mean? I bet it differs from mine. An easy bet, because we've led different lives with different experiences. What you think of as "ruined" may be my version of "it took 15 years to finally get over something tramautic"
What I see in my own grief, and the many, and I mean many parents who I interact with as part of my own support, is that each of us takes it day by day. Some people have a lot more days of waking up wishing they were dead than other people. Some people channel the grief into starting foundations. None of their behavior is strong, or weak, or entitled, good, bad, right, wrong, or whatever subjective sort of adjective you want to categorize it with. Nor are their lives "ruined", even if they're 14 years into waking up every day wanting to die. Day by day. It's people who have lost someone, someone so innocent, someone they're supposed to protect - there are no words to describe the pain. So while you're trying to decide if someone's grief is "weakness" or "entitlement", they're experiencing it.
Grief is evidence of your love for someone, and in my mind, that sort of love takes a certain sort of strength. To love, knowing it cannot last forever, takes strength. That is as old as humankind itself, and not new, nor a weakness.
An alternative way to look at it is that the people of the past were subjected to massive unprocessed trauma at every age, and that made them weaker than us.
One person sees the body and shrieks in horror and goes into a fit of panic.
Another (an ER doctor) is cool as a cucumber from years of desensitization, calmly treats and saves the body.
I’d have a hard time describing the ER doctor as “weaker”. They’re unquestionable more capable and useful. And I propose stronger not weaker.
President Joe Biden has outlived two of his children. In 1972, his daughter and wife died in a car accident.
He would go on to say just how common it was to know a child or adult that died. It was just a normal part of existence.
Today, it simply means that Jeff is going to be 45 minutes late for work.
Since I lived in the "surely dead" era, I still react that way if someone mentions someone getting in a wreck. People must assume I'm upset over Jeff's surely totaled car (something that didn't always happen in the olden days).
I am unaware of this being a past obsession, do you have a source?
I thought it’s a modern meme. Oxford lists earliest use as 1910: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/childbearing-hips_n
Even though mother and child mortality is minimized, there are 999 life-altering things that can go wrong.
Take the simplest ones: what % of the population has the kind of mental illness that’ll destroy your relationship with them? E.g. borderline personality, sociopaths, etc.
Easily 5% or more.
That alone is a 1 in 20 chance of your kid ruining a significant portion of your life, not to mention you bringing a kid into the world with an inevitably ruined life.
And then there’s physical disability, not to mention financial burden.
It’s not worth it.
I’m very glad other people roll those dice: I’m happy to live in a populated world. But I don’t touch the dice myself.
Sleepless nights and fatigue? That’s the least of the associated worries.
People who rolled the same dice and ended up in the 3/20 group usually don’t comment.
Sometimes they do:
Some subset with a damaged life shrugs and says it was all worth it.
16% of the world population has a significant disability according to the WHO. Most of them are not born with it: age related (dementia, blindness,..), serious work accidents, lasting effects of diseases,...
Loads of them can get treated or won't alter life as much in the western world.
If your family history has no cases of mental illnesses, chances are very low to get them.
For a serious learning disability (not able to attend normal school), it's probably 1 in 20. Most of these kids will still live a fairly normal life in the western world.
Also, chances of disabilities also increase with the age of the parents. Best to have your kids between 20-35 to keep the odds down. Above 40 is a lot more dangerous than under 30.
And social-economic factors play a big role too in food, stabile stress-free upbringing and healthy activities.