Why were children considered "Expendable" mostly before the Viet Nam War?

 It's because many children died between birth and age 10 or 20. So, the way people dealt with this is they tried not to think of children as "permanent" or potentially viable adults like they do now. Now, every life is precious. But, in order to psychologically survive children dying so much, people sort of looked at kids more they way you look at pets today. This was engrained in people as a way of coping when children died often.

For example, you can hear this in my mother's childhood prayer:

"Now I lay me down to sleep

I pray the Lord my soul to keep

If I should die before I wake

I pray the Lord my soul to take"

People wouldn't teach their kids a night time prayer like this now

but this was the one taught to my mother in the 1920s when kids died a lot.

and kids continued to die a lot for a variety of reasons, Mostly parental ignorance about basic things and a general lack of medical knowledge in the general populace then.

For example, most people treated doctors either like Gods or they never went to doctors at all (one of the two). My father and grandfather were the type to NEVER GO TO DOCTORS EVER which I suppose if you are healthy enough is okay.

So, I basically never went to doctors at all either unless I needed stitches or broke something myself because this was the way my family on my Dad's side actually was. So, I didn't start going to the doctor more regularly until my mid 40s when I married my present wife whose uncle was a heart surgeon.

So, basically kids died all the time mostly because adults were mostly too ignorant about doctors and medical things so that kids just died from almost anything including accidents.

When did this all change?

During the Viet Nam War boys didn't want to die or to get serious PTSD for life so they went to college to get a deferment. Girls who wanted to marry college graduates went to college in unbelievable numbers too so this is sort of what led to so many people with Masters degrees and PHds.

Then their children followed in their parents footsteps and got master's degrees and PHds too.

This is how we basically got to here compliments of the Viet Nam War.