Isn't letting me asign variables to the children inside the script?

I have a script that has a decent amount of children that I need to reference all of with variables, so I wanted to make it a little more efficient by having it automatically get all the children inside with a table and assign different variables to them. This is the script I have right now:

local cdn = script:GetChildren()
for i = 1, #cdn do
	local child = cdn[i]
	anim(i) = child
end

My issue is on line 4, it gives me an error saying "Expected identifier when parsing expression, got =", so what do I do to fix this?

Revised Solution:

So I didn't get your response from what you were trying to do earlier, so let me explain your error. You didn't define the variable before you did that for-i-loop, so here's a fix I did.

local anim

local cdn = script:GetChildren()
for i = 1, #cdn do
    local child = cdn[i]
	anim[i] = child
end

Yo cannot create a variable out of thin air the way you wish to. Believe me I’ve tried several times before as a beginner. You however can achieve a similar effect to what you desire by creating a dictionary type array. This table will allow you to reference a Child by their name as an Index to the list.

local function GetChildrenListFor(Parent)
    local ChildList = {} do
      for i,Child in pairs(Parent:GetChildren()) do
            ChildList[Child.Name..i] = Child
        end
    end
    return ChildList
end

local ChildList = GetChildrenListFor(script)
print(ChildList["Anim1"])

Although I normally don’t question many different programs, you can simply just do script.ChildName whenever you wish to use an Object.