Parenting & Family Quote by Anthony Hecht

Hecht turns childhood curiosity into a small, corrosive theology: adults don’t just withhold information, they take vows. By likening family secrecy to “the Masonic rites,” he borrows the aura of fraternal power and ritualized exclusion, making the domestic world feel like a lodge with passwords, handshakes, and penalties for disclosure. The comparison is slyly comic, but the sting is real. A child isn’t merely ignorant; a child is formally “uninitiated,” written out of the circle by design.

The sentence does something elegant with pronouns. “Parents and elders” sounds civic, almost tribunal-like, broadening the conspiracy beyond a single household into a whole generational regime. Then comes the flattening addendum: “which include all children.” No exceptions, no special access. That’s how hierarchy becomes naturalized - not through cruelty, but through tradition.

“And so we sought for signs” flips the power dynamic in a single pivot. If adults won’t speak, children become readers of omens: tone, glances, overheard fragments, the atmosphere after a phone call. Hecht captures the way secrecy doesn’t prevent knowledge; it reroutes it into interpretation, suspicion, pattern-hunting. The subtext is that enforced innocence breeds amateur detectives, and that the emotional cost of being kept out is paid in anxious imagination.

Coming from a postwar American poet acutely attentive to trauma and its evasions, the line also hints at larger silences - the things families and cultures encode as “not for children,” then wonder why the children grow up scanning the walls for meaning.