No. There has been no cultural shift with this. If anything, there's no where you can go without reading a story about a kid dying. It is an ever present fear, from the moment of conception, that something, anything, everything could go wrong. Every parent gives birth knowing that the child will die someday and we just hope that it's a long, long, long time before it happens. And until we ourselves die, there's a constant "what if" ticker running in our heads. Constant.

In times and places where infant mortality is high and childhood death is very common, there's no parent who buries a child and looks at his or her remaining children and thinks, "well, 4 out of 5 ain't bad." Similarly, no parent buries a child thinking that it couldn't have happened. Only that their worst fear came true. Only that that they desperately wish it hadn't.

The statement "parents don't bury their children" is not a statement of disbelief or expectation of immortality. It is a recognition of mortality, a shared fear, and a deep empathy for parents who are dealing with this grief. It is a statement of sorrow for the depth of suffering that a parent burying a child must feel. It is almost unbearable to think of suffering it ourselves. But don't for a moment believe that we don't think about it.