Parenting & Family Quote by Elle Macpherson

Macpherson’s line lands like a soft rebuke to the old, proprietary model of parenting: the idea that children are projects to perfect or extensions of adult ambition. Coming from a fashion figure whose career was built on being looked at, evaluated, and managed, the emphasis on autonomy reads as more than a feel-good mantra. It’s an insistence that the most intimate relationship in a family shouldn’t mirror an industry where bodies and images are routinely treated as assets.

The phrasing matters. “Own” is blunt and transactional, summoning the language of property, control, even brand stewardship. Then she pivots to “souls,” a deliberately spacious word that pulls the child out of the marketplace and into something inviolable. That shift is the rhetorical engine: it reframes parenting from management to accompaniment. “Guide and support” is also carefully modest. It doesn’t deny responsibility; it shrinks parental power to something closer to coaching than command.

The subtext is a cultural corrective to helicopter parenting and the high-stakes performance of modern parenthood, where a kid’s choices can feel like a public referendum on the adults. Macpherson is quietly refusing that bargain. She’s telling parents to stop reading their children as mirrors and start seeing them as separate, stubbornly self-directed people. It’s a boundary-setting statement dressed in warmth: love without possession, care without capture.