The majority of parents today have never known the pain of losing a child. Sadly, that was not the case throughout history. Before the 20th century, many parents could expect one or more of their children to die before reaching adulthood, usually due to infectious disease. As in the book it was based on, the film adaptation of Hamnet centers on parental grief. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, there’s a good chance you’ve seen the tear-streaked aftermath of others who have. Jessie Buckley’s Oscar-winning performance as a grieving mother wrecked audiences far and wide. Her improvised, guttural scream after her child’s death went straight to the heart. Her calling the scream “ancient” couldn’t feel more accurate. @screenplayed Jessie Buckley talks about this moment in Hamnet wasn’t in the script. It came up on the day. Buckley is nominated for an Academy Award for her performance. What do you think of the film? #hamnet #jessiebuckley #academyawards #oscars #filmtok ♬ original sound – Screenplayed However, some people have questioned whether the film’s intense portrayal of grief is realistic for the time period. Naturally, we would expect a child’s death to devastate a parent today. But was that the case historically? Did parents mourn the loss of a child as hard or as long when nearly half of children died? Would knowing you were likely to lose a child, or multiple children, make their deaths easier to handle? The idea that parents hundreds of years ago weren’t as emotionally attached to their kids isn’t new, even in academic circles. Dr. Julia Martins, a historian, explored the debate in a YouTube video titled “Did They Love Their Children? The History of Grief.” It began with French historian Philippe Ariès, who published a book in 1960 about childhood through the centuries. “Ariès argued that the concept of childhood as a distinct, protected phase of life is a modern invention that only emerged around the 17th century,” Martins said. “Children were understood as mini adults and, from the time they were around seven, they mixed with the adult world. He suggested that, because of the incredibly high infant mortality, parents were forced to be emotionally distant and not get too attached to their children, who might not live to see their first birthday. This indifference would be a defense mechanism. Expecting to lose half the children you had would make you not as emotionally invested in them.” In his 1977 book The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800, historian Lawrence Stone also posited that colder, more pragmatic family relationships were the norm. In his assessment, the affectionate, loving bonds we associate with family today developed late in our history. ‘Hail! Potita was the sweetest and most gentle child. She lived 3 years.’(Ave Potita dulcissima et humanissima annorum III )Gravestone of a young girl named Potita, 1st-2nd century AD pic.twitter.com/mGPpFgO7E0— Gareth Harney (@OptimoPrincipi) February 28, 2025 However, by the 1980s, historians began to question this idea. Martins pointed out that Ariès relied on paintings from the past to draw his conclusions. For her 1983 book Forgotten Children, historian Linda Pollock focused her research on diaries and autobiographies from the 16th to 19th centuries. She argued that parents have always had intense love for their children and felt a deep sense of loss when they died. Martins’ own examination of the historical record has led her to the same conclusion. The difference, she suggested, lies in how parents coped with the pain of losing a child. “We forget how deeply religious early modern Europe was,” Martins said. “Could this indifference be religious resignation, instead of lack of affection? In a world where people understood death as God’s will, parents might console themselves thinking things like ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.’ That doesn’t mean they weren’t grieving, but rather that they were focusing on the child being in heaven and accepting God’s will. Ariès interpreted this as a lack of feeling. But you could argue that this was a coping strategy for deep pain. The grief was real; the cultural script for expressing it was different.” Hamnet is a tidal wave of grief and beauty at its stillest. There’s something enchanting in how stories transcend time, finding us in loss to anchor us in the present. A lush world inviting cathartic release, where emotion flows deep, asking you to surrender to feel it all pic.twitter.com/GQc9MlOiuT— Jillian (@JillianChili) October 6, 2025 And of course, grief is and has always been an individual experience. Even in Hamnet, the parents express their grief differently, despite losing the same child. People in the comments on Martins’ video reiterated how historical artifacts demonstrate expressions of parental grief: “Sometimes I find myself thinking of the skull of the ancient Greek child with the crown of painted ceramic flowers on her head. Someone loved that child to the point that they couldn’t bear the thought of those flowers wilting.” “Whenever I hear the claim that people didn’t grieve their children, I think of the ancient graves we find where children are so carefully prepared for burial, with a toy (obviously made by hand, so carrying a time cost and not quickly replaceable) buried with them. That doesn’t seem like the actions of a parent who doesn’t care.” “My favorite example about children always being children are ancient Egyptian ‘hot wheels’: toys shaped like a tiny chariot or wagon with wheels on it, and holes to put a string through… I can’t erase the mental image I got of an ancient Egyptian child thousands of years ago running around lugging A TOY CAR around, forgetting or breaking it and crying to parents, or being happy about getting a new one as a holiday gift, nothing really changed.” “Cicero was inconsolable when his daughter Tullia died. Julius Caesar, who had also lost his daughter Julia, his only child, wrote to him to offer sympathy. They had a whole correspondence on grief. Cicero built a temple (lost today) to the memory of his daughter. The idea that parents from the past did not care is ludicrous.” “It always felt to me so strange to figure that people in the past ‘wouldn’t care so much’ for their kids because a lot of children died. Two things can be true at the same time. People surely knew that lots of people died in a very early age AND that doesn’t diminish any kind of bond or attachment. Ironically, it’s this theory itself that IS detached (from reality): humans are social creatures!” The post Historian debunks the notion that grief in ‘Hamnet’ was portrayed unrealistically for the time appeared first on Upworthy.