The question is horrifying enough to shut off all reason and make me want to disengage entirely with the question, if that answers your question.
Incidentally, it’s the reason that when more of the population were parents, movies never killed kids in the end; it doesn’t just shock, it shocks to a level that breaks immersion and suspension of disbelief— I don’t get scared, I think “oh, this is just a movie with actors and whatnot”. (Now parents are less of a majority, so studios are more willing to push this boundary.)
Media and stories are not the real world, and serve a different purpose. Again, it’s an immersion breaking thing— not because it’s not realistic, but because the fact that it IS realistic triggers people to an extent that it, again, breaks willing suspension of disbelief.
It’s totally valid that a child dying on-screen is triggering for you. I have PTSD, and that feeling of suspension of disbelief being broken is pretty much exactly what derealization feels like, except I get it about things happening in the real world, as well as in movies and TV shows.
With all of that said, I don’t really think you could say the percentage of parents can be said to be causative for how media depicts child death, it’s really more of a direct result of the Hays code - prior to the Hays code depictions of child death weren’t that rare. Child death was more common in those days too, I suppose. It was after the Hays code fell apart, i.e. the 70s where things started to move towards being more violent, and I think that was more likely caused by mainstream depictions of the Vietnam war on the news - and that was probably the decade with more parents than any other decade prior, given the fertility rate peaked in the 60s.
The question is horrifying enough to shut off all reason and make me want to disengage entirely with the question, if that answers your question.
Incidentally, it’s the reason that when more of the population were parents, movies never killed kids in the end; it doesn’t just shock, it shocks to a level that breaks immersion and suspension of disbelief— I don’t get scared, I think “oh, this is just a movie with actors and whatnot”. (Now parents are less of a majority, so studios are more willing to push this boundary.)
Kids die in the real world, you know? And not at all infrequently. I think our media should be at least somewhat representative of reality.
Media and stories are not the real world, and serve a different purpose. Again, it’s an immersion breaking thing— not because it’s not realistic, but because the fact that it IS realistic triggers people to an extent that it, again, breaks willing suspension of disbelief.
It’s totally valid that a child dying on-screen is triggering for you. I have PTSD, and that feeling of suspension of disbelief being broken is pretty much exactly what derealization feels like, except I get it about things happening in the real world, as well as in movies and TV shows.
With all of that said, I don’t really think you could say the percentage of parents can be said to be causative for how media depicts child death, it’s really more of a direct result of the Hays code - prior to the Hays code depictions of child death weren’t that rare. Child death was more common in those days too, I suppose. It was after the Hays code fell apart, i.e. the 70s where things started to move towards being more violent, and I think that was more likely caused by mainstream depictions of the Vietnam war on the news - and that was probably the decade with more parents than any other decade prior, given the fertility rate peaked in the 60s.