I recently heard the tragic story of Bridget Cleary who was murdered by her husband for, according to him, being a changeling fairy and not his wife. An Irish nursery rhyme was inspired by this event,
"Are you a witch, or are you a fairy/Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?"
And then there's the more famous example of "Ring Around the Rosie." This got me wondering, if something like this happened today and children chanted or sang little songs about it, I'd think most parents would scold their children for making up rhymes about someone's death. Did the parents of days long ago not care that their children would "make light" of a tragic situation? Did they just laugh it off, or not pay attention, or would they encourage it? Also, who made up these nursery rhymes? Would the kids overhear their parents talking about the news and then make up songs about it, or would the adults make up the nursery rhymes and sing it to the kids?
Very likely it did not bother them to have their children singing them. Nursery rhymes would be sung at the same time Broadside Ballads would be sold in the local market and bought for singing in taverns and homes: these were composed about recent murders and other tragic events, and children would be hearing their own parents sing about sisters being pushed into the ocean to drown and boyfriends knifing their girlfriends ( though a possible reason for the knifing- an unwanted pregnancy- would never be mentioned, or anything else openly sexual). The original Grimm's Fairy Tales have quite a lot of bloodshed and cruelty in them, too- modern editors tidied them up for modern mothers. Death was also not rare enough to be hidden away. It's worth remembering that in a pre-industrial village, most children would have already seen a dead body before they were very old, and likely it would have been someone they knew, possibly a close member of the family.
Laslett: The World We Have Lost