Parenting & Family Quote by Alfred Adler

Adler refuses the lazy comfort of straight lines. Malnutrition may be a risk factor, but it is not a verdict; what matters is the meaning the child manufactures out of deprivation. The sentence is built like a reprimand to deterministic thinking: you can almost hear him swatting away the era's favorite explanations - biology, poverty, "bad stock" - and replacing them with a more unsettling proposition. If you want to understand harm, you have to enter the child's private logic.

That phrase, "what conclusion the child has drawn", is classic Adler: psychology as interpretation, not diagnosis-by-spreadsheet. It smuggles in his core premise from Individual Psychology: behavior is goal-directed, organized around a subjective story about the self, others, and what it takes to belong. A hungry child might "conclude" that the world is hostile, that taking is safer than asking, that attention only arrives through disruption. Another might conclude the opposite and become hyper-responsible, anxious, pleasing. Same condition, different script.

The subtext is political as much as clinical. Adler is warning social reformers and moralists against treating crime as an automatic output of misery, because that view invites both fatalism ("they can't help it") and stigma ("they're destined"). His alternative demands harder work: listen for the child's interpretation, the small, early decisions about trust, power, and worth. It's an argument for agency without blame, and for prevention that targets not only bodies and budgets but the narratives children are forced to write in order to survive.