Banty wrote:

I think such situations would be judged differently in decades past. It'd be
viewed as a tragedy, but not negligence.

This is more of the feeling that I had about such situations when I made the
original post. Many, if not most, kids in past generations learned that they
had to become responsible at an early age. Dickens's workhouse England,
American farm families, and the general tenor of living closer to the land
prior to the 1960s made kids more aware of consequences, and minimized the
number of different ways they could get into life and death situations. More
often than not, a child was intimately exposed to the death of a friend or
family member, or at least a farm animal, early on in life.

Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine" explores the nature of being a child just
before the 1929 depression. I stumbled across excerpts after writing the
original post and found them a useful comparison to the responses here.