Parenting & Family Quote by Anne Cassidy

Cassidy slips a quiet dare into the language of good parenting: don’t just raise a competent realist, raise someone with a deliberately protected glitch in their logic - the willingness to bet on what can’t be proven. “Here and now” is the vocabulary of schedules, outcomes, and adult defensiveness. “Grand maybes” is a far more seductive phrase, swelling possibility into something almost mythic. The line works because it treats imagination not as a soft extra but as a formative belief system, one that has to be installed early, before the world teaches kids to bargain their wonder down into practicality.

The subtext is a pushback against a culture that equates maturity with cynicism. Cassidy isn’t praising childishness as immaturity; she’s pointing to a “small yet crucial” remnant - a retained capacity for play, risk, and curiosity. That qualifier matters. She’s not arguing for permanent naivete. She’s arguing for an inner pocket of innocence that adulthood can consult when it’s tempted to calcify.

Contextually, it sits in the tradition of children’s literature and YA-adjacent moral psychology, where the real antagonist is often not a villain but a narrowing of perception: adults who stop believing in anything they can’t measure. The word “guarantees” is doing heavy lifting, too. It’s not wistful; it’s prescriptive. If you want a person who can live beyond mere survival - who can invent, empathize, hope - you safeguard their “maybes,” and you accept that a part of them will resist being fully domesticated.