You mean parents can't seem to tolerate even a single dead child. And that's true, especially when most parents only ever have one or two children.

Obviously they don't want them to die. To parents, their children aren't an abstract idea or a number that they can rationalize away.

If every parents react the same way then that is effectively the whole society no? Imagine the reaction of a modern day town if a child had broke their neck from the playground, what would the reaction? I wouldn't put demolishing the playground outside of the realm of possibility.

> Obviously they don't want them to die. To parents, their children aren't an abstract idea or a number that they can rationalize away.

Yea and this is why this is quite interesting to think about for me. In a way, perhaps it is better that failures to happen in small numbers many times, instead of 1 big societal level failure that only need to happen once. I think part of the problem is that people have access to global news today. Even 1 children choking on some candy or whatever from the other side of the globe would mean that every children would be stripped of this experience.

This is extremely locale-dependent. In the US? There would be lawsuits, fences, height restrictions, and so on.

In the Netherlands? They’d put up a sign, maybe.

Are you saying that parents don't care when their children are killed in a school shooting?

That I believe is part of it. My parents were children before WWII and both came from large families—there were seven siblings on each side. On the other hand my generation had typically two kids.

It would be ludicrous to suggest that my grandparents didn't love their kids or care as much about them given their numbers but the fact is—put brutally—there was considerable solace in having 'spares'.

Today, it is very easy to forget that prewar many more kids per capita never reached adulthood. Most people alive today have never known a time without penicillin or the pre-polio-vaccine days. People in those days were much more fatalistic about life and the lives of their kids as life back then was considerably more 'fragile'. Today, we expect our kids to reach adulthood and outlive us, back then most hoped that would happen but they were more circumspect about it. When a kid died of course parents would be terribly upset but when it happened they always knew there was more chance of it happening than just a remote possability.

I noticed this fatalism in my grandparents, especially my grandmother, she came from a big family and she had a big family and in both cases some kids died before reaching adulthood.