Htydjtk

The reality of pre-Industrial Revolution times was that about half the children born died before age 5. It would be a mistake to think that parents cared less - we have multiple written records showing that they cared very much. At the same time, there was this coping mechanism - parents tried not to get too attached to very young children, because of the possibility of losing them. In some cultures, for example, children were not even named until about 1 year old. Another coping mechanism was of course that there were other children to take care of, and very soon the mother would be pregnant again. The lost children were mourned, but the loss was endured.

To a modern reader, losing a child is a tragedy one can hardly recover from, it very much is the end of the world. It is something that does not, should not, happen, a terrible mistake in the running of the cosmos. Treating the loss of a child as anything else is treated as almost inhuman.

Those are the two conflicting views I try to balance, setting a story in a pre-modern setting. The problem becomes particularly pertinent in a story that sprawls over several decades (with time skips), and thus the issue cannot be just "invisible". It seems my options are:

• No dead children. Every character has ~10 siblings, and consequently ~100 first cousins on each side. This option looks a bit crazy.


• Characters have dead siblings, somewhere in the time-skips they also lose children. All of this happens off-screen, and only gets mentioned in passing. Does this risk alienating my readers?


• Losing a child actually happens on-screen, within the melange of all the other events (but not taking central stage for very long). I address the tragedy and getting over it. Again, what would be more alienating - the previous option, or this one?


• People just seem to have a smaller number of children, no explanation given. This option is not too realistic, and always stretches my suspension of disbelief when I see it, but maybe it's necessary?

Are there any options I am missing? Or anything about the solutions presented that I am missing? Which solution is preferable?

My particular story is set in a royal court, and spans several decades. Under those circumstances, the number and health of royal children become important both to court politics and to international politics.

Take cues from historical source material

You've clearly already put in some research. How did contemporary people address the loss when writing about their lives? (Hint: the answer varies, from stoicism and scarcely mentioning it, to hopeful talk of an afterlife and being reunited, to uninhibited grief.) If you're trying to give the flavor of a time period, lean on original sources to guide the manner in which you address things.

Write for your audience, but tell YOUR story

It's entirely true (although I was in denial of for a long time) that if you want anyone else to be interested in or enjoy your writing, you have to shape your writing to be digestible and interesting to THEM. However, writing as if you're doing a paint-by-numbers, and being sure you add enough of every shade "because that's what the audience likes" usually gets the audience wrong. You're probably better off writing the story you think is interesting, and finding an audience that is interested in the same thing (like life in the past, with the bleakness and trials we have often forgotten about in our modern comforts) than to guess (probably incorrectly) at what "other" people like or can bear.

Bridge the gap between the world you're portraying and the audience that is reading it. Although you shouldn't forget that sometimes granularity of detail is just a bad idea because the amount of energy in telling is not a justified investment (think Chekhov's Gun, not so much in the usual terms of expectations as in terms of extraneous and irrelevant content). But if you're writing about the vicissitudes of royal succession in olden times, it's almost certainly the case that high infant mortality and low childhood survival rates SHOULD be front and center to the plot.

On a personal note, my mother lost a baby, and when others told her that they couldn't have gone on if that had happened to them... She remarked to me that, with all her other children and responsibilities, she just didn't see any realistic option but to go on. It's likely that the realization of being able to continue in the face of serious grief and loss because of necessity is a theme that will naturally arise in a story that wrestles with mortality and the young.

I would go with characters have dead siblings; but that happens off-screen.

Showing it on-screen, and in-period-realistic, might be off-putting itself.

Everything you are talking about is a statistical distribution; averages, a bell-curve of sorts. Nothing says your character have to reside in the center of it. So child-deaths can happen primarily to others, not the MC king or his relatives.

Much of those deaths were due to the poor nutrition and the extreme labor of day-to-day living for the majority of people, that many royals need not experience directly. They have servants, they can rest all day, they don't have to struggle to feed themselves or other children.

So I would portray the societal milieu somewhat accurately, but my characters are lucky enough to not experience the child deaths directly (unless that serves some plot purpose). They still recognize it, they still fear it, but hey, they're special, God takes pity on them and they're grateful for it.

You can still have their relatives suffer that if you want, they just don't experience it themselves. A courier arrives with news of their sister Jane, she has lost her third child in a row. Thank God she has produced at least one heir. We must have her up for a visit, so we can comfort her.

Is child mortality relevant to your story? If not, then I just wouldn't bring it up. There are all sorts of tragedies in the world. I don't consider a story unrealistic because it failed to discuss every possible thing that could go wrong with anyone's life. In the 21st century, people die from cancer, but most novels never mention cancer. People lose their jobs, but most novels don't discuss unemployment. People are robbed and murdered and kidnapped, but most novels don't mention these events. Etc.

Frankly, I would be very surprised if, say, a murder mystery said, "Detective Brown arrived at the scene of the crime. Brown had two children, a boy and a girl, plus a second daughter who had died of leukemia many years before. Brown and his wife were very upset when their daughter died. Mrs Brown cried uncontrollably for days ..." etc, and then have all of this never be relevant to the murder or to anything else in the story.

In general, we don't expect a story to describe everything that ever happened or might have happened in every character's life. We expect a story to have a point and a focus. I am suddenly reminded of a piece of writing advice I read many years ago: Don't tell everything that happened. Tell everything RELEVANT that happened.

You could, of course, write a good story about the grief parents suffer when a child dies. Or about the effect on society of high child mortality. But if that's not what the story is about, don't drag it in just because it exists.

In general, I agree with @Amadeus above, however suggest that using your third bulleted suggestion is the best. Character development is important, and losing a child is a great way to show how that character responds to tragedy. The death of the child doesn't need to be graphic or detailed, but maybe the response of the POV parent should be.

If it were me writing such, I would combine the second and third options. Children are fortunate to live to be old enough to help with the farm/store or whatever the family uses to survive. I would mention lost children - some stillborn and others died of malnutrition, illness or accident.

I would have maybe five surviving children, perhaps remembering the last baby to die and afraid it would happen again as there was a new addition due any day. Fears of the mother dying in childbirth would surface and the living children would be the most fortunate ones.

I would include a scene, perhaps not the MC directly, but of a child who dies of an illness. Let the parents mourn and the siblings. The parents must rise the next morning - farms don’t run themselves. Grief stricken, they go about their lives because they have no choice.

If they are servants, they might have even less opportunity to grieve and keep their sorrows to themselves. A general sense of personal tragedy but so common that others just nod and know - lost another one.

If someone asks how many children a family has, perhaps, like Wordsworth’s We Are Seven, living and dead have equal presence in their lives. Never forgotten, but there are others who need care, others who must be consoled and many tasks to complete before they can have some privacy and weep for the lost.

In certain parts of the world (I canvassed for the CCF) parents must choose whether to sell one of their children so that they can properly feed the others.