In Barbara Tuchman's book on the 14th century, A Distant Mirror she talks about how infrequently anyone wrote about children. You could find books on all kinds of obscure topics, all over the place. But nothing on child rearing. Almost no mention of children, their behavior, their relationship with their parents.

She doesn't know why this should be, but she hypothesizes that it's because during and after the Black Death, children often didn't survive into adulthood. So they may have avoided getting attached to them as a defensive measure.

That's not directly an answer to your question, but it seemed useful and related.

/r/AskAnthropology is probably a better place to ask this, however, I do have a book recommendation for you.

"A Social History of Dying" by Allan Kellehear explores the act of dying, and how perception of it has changed over time, both for the soon to be deceased and for the ones left behind. It is an interesting book-length treatment of this if you are interested in in-depth exploration, although I would caution you that personally, I found the writing style to be pretty dry.

This might be more of a question for /r/AskAnthropology.

Historian Philippe Ariès, in Western Attitudes Towards Death talked about how ideas towards death and grieving had changed from centuries ago to the present (of the 1970s when working on the book).

Back during the American Civil War death was more a public affair. In order for one to have a "good death" you should be surrounded by family and friends (children included) so they can stand witness to any last confessions (you're dying. Why would you lie?) and instructions. They also wanted to see how you died. By that I mean they wanted to see if you held your composure. It was believed that how one died could predict where one would end up in the after-life. So death, and grieving, wasn't something to be hidden.

The society started to change and brought about "thy death." If you were dying you'd pretend to not be because you didn't want to upset your family and friends. Your family and friends would pretend you weren't dying to avoid upsetting you. This happened in conjunction with the growth in the number of hospitals. With that, people no longer mostly died at home but in a hospital bed. With this rose the "hidden death." Dying in an institution allowed the family to ignore what was happening. Drugs such as morphine allowed the dying to die quietly and spared any witnesses from having to listen to the agony. Basically, a "good death" became one which can be ignored. Think of common euphemisms for death: "we lost him." "He passed." "He kicked the bucket." And so on. All of this is to mask death. Funerals do their part, as well. Embalming (which became popular during the Civil War) and putting make-up on the deceased allowed mourners to pretend that the dead wasn't, in fact, dead.

So yeah. Death and mourning transitioned from a public spectacle to a private, from overt to pornographic.

Is it still like that today? I don't know. Aries wrote his work decades ago and could not see the rise of social media. Current events is outside the purview of this sub and my expertise.

If you want to know more I strongly suggest reading where I got my info from:

"The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Towards Death over the Last Thousand Years" by Philippe Aries

"This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War" Drew Gilpin Faust.