Parenting & Family Quote by Cathy Rigby

Bittersweet is doing double duty here: it names the tone of a children’s fantasy, and it smuggles in the grown-up truth that makes the fantasy stick. Cathy Rigby, coming from sport and performance rather than the lecture hall, speaks in plain emotional physics. The “adventures” and “believe they can fly” aren’t just cute metaphors; they’re childhood’s preferred coping strategies. Flight is agency. Adventure is rehearsal for independence. Kids don’t daydream about soaring because they’re naive; they do it because the world keeps reminding them how small they are.

Then Rigby pivots, quietly, to the real engine: “that fear about people leaving you.” She’s pointing at the shadow behind every wish-fulfillment story, especially the Peter Pan ecosystem she’s closely associated with. Neverland sells eternal play, but the price tag is attachment. The subtext is that growing up isn’t only about gaining freedom; it’s about learning that freedom comes with exits, separations, and sometimes abandonment. The sweetness of imagination tastes better because it’s cut with the sourness of loss.

As an athlete-turned-stage icon, Rigby also reads like someone fluent in the discipline beneath spectacle. Flying, on stage or in life, requires rigging: trust, timing, someone literally holding the lines. Her line lands because it refuses to patronize kids. It credits them with an emotional radar adults often pretend they lack, and it explains why “family entertainment” endures when it admits what everyone in the audience already knows: the scary part of leaving is wanting to go and missing people anyway.