Parenting & Family Quote by Fred G. Gosman

Gosman’s line is a neat little grenade tossed into the sanctimony around family. It takes a thought many people treat as shameful - the occasional childhood daydream of being “from somewhere else,” with cooler, kinder, richer, more glamorous parents - and reframes it as a sign of creative health. The provocation works because it flips the moral valence: instead of loyalty being the marker of a good child, imagination is. And if imagination requires alternatives, then the family becomes the first system a kid learns to mentally redesign.

The intent isn’t to insult actual parents so much as to puncture the myth that children experience home life as a stable, unquestioned truth. Kids run tiny counterfactuals constantly: What if my life had different rules? Different names? A different story? Fantasizing about “other parents” is the most intimate version of that experiment, because it challenges the earliest authority a person encounters. In Gosman’s framing, the fantasy isn’t evidence of trauma; it’s evidence of narrative agency.

There’s subtextual empathy here, too: it normalizes a private, slightly rebellious inner life, giving adults permission to remember their own ungrateful thoughts without guilt. The context feels post-Freudian and pop-psych adjacent, but with a writer’s wink: childhood isn’t a shrine, it’s a rehearsal space. If you never rehearsed a different cast, Gosman implies, you may have grown up too obedient - or simply never learned that your life could be edited.