Parenting & Family Quote by Frank Wedekind

Wedekind’s line lands like a smirk in a courtroom: “The laws of this world are for children.” It’s not a plea for innocence; it’s an accusation of naivete. In his universe, “law” isn’t a moral scaffold so much as a story adults tell to keep desire, class anxiety, and institutional hypocrisy from showing their teeth. Children, in this formulation, are the only ones expected to believe the rules are coherent, benevolent, and evenly enforced. Adults know better. They comply selectively, weaponize statutes as etiquette for the powerless, then call that order.

The intent is characteristically Wedekind: to strip bourgeois respectability down to its stage props. His plays (most infamously Spring Awakening and the Lulu cycle) orbit the collision between erotic life and the institutions that claim to manage it: school, family, church, the state. Those systems preach discipline while producing ignorance and shame; they punish the consequences of repression as if they were personal failings. The line’s bite is in “this world” too, implying an alternative reality beneath the official one: instinct, appetite, brutality, the private economy of favors and coercion.

Subtextually, it’s also a power map. If laws are “for children,” then maturity equals recognizing that rules are not neutral. They’re negotiated, evaded, bought, or performed. Wedekind isn’t celebrating lawlessness; he’s exposing the cynical adulthood that treats law as theater - and the tragedy of the young who step onto that stage believing the script is real.