I'm just gonna comment, taken the other way, this could be a sci-fi premise.

Instead of seeing your child go from 0 to 1 (was it murder? An accident, disease?

I'm thinking maybe the MC or a group can now see this number, and realise that all schoolchildren have a kill count, all people do, even little old ladies who bake cookies for the neighborhood. The number reduces in populations with less capitalist tendencies.

Sort of a ham-fisted metaphor about the modern world running on the misery of three quarters of its humans.