Parenting & Family Quote by Pearl S. Buck

Buck’s line lands like a moral indictment disguised as a definition. By asking “What is a neglected child?” she borrows the cool authority of a dictionary, then detonates it with a claim that widens neglect from a private failure to a social crime. The real provocation is temporal: neglect doesn’t start with bruises, hunger, or silence in the home; it starts in the realm of intention, policy, and permission. “Not planned for, not wanted” reads blunt on purpose, refusing the soothing fiction that neglect is only about overwhelmed parents making mistakes. Buck points to a pre-birth calculus of value.

The subtext is sharper than it first appears. She’s not only talking about individual parents; she’s interrogating a culture that treats children as optional accessories rather than obligations with rights. In Buck’s era, debates over contraception, poverty, illegitimacy, and women’s autonomy were morally charged and often policed by shame. Her sentence side-steps that theater and draws a hard line: if society denies people the means to plan, support, or choose parenthood, it manufactures neglect while still pretending the problem begins in the nursery.

As a novelist, Buck understood how harm accumulates quietly, long before it becomes visible. The phrasing makes complicity hard to dodge: neglect isn’t an accident that happens to a child; it’s a decision - sometimes personal, sometimes structural - that happens about them, before they can even exist to protest it.