Parenting & Family Quote by Meg Tilly

Tilly is doing something quietly radical here: refusing the fashionable idea that everything is just a “thing” if you look at it hard enough. In an era when we toggle between people and products on the same glowing screen, she draws a bright moral line between a child and a chair, then admits it starts as a discipline of perception. The “change in my way of thinking” isn’t airy self-help; it’s an ethical reset, a decision to re-train attention so it stops flattening the world.

The quote works because it’s deliberately plain. No grand metaphysics, no “soul” language, just a domestic comparison that lands with the force of common sense. That’s the subtext: if you need to remind yourself that a child isn’t furniture, something in modern life has made that reminder necessary. She’s pointing at the creeping tendency to objectify what demands care - to treat relationships like manageable items, parenthood like a task list, emotions like clutter you can reorganize.

There’s also an actor’s sensibility embedded in it. Performance is about seeing: noticing the difference between presence and prop, between a living scene partner and a set dressing. Tilly frames parenthood the same way - not as sentimental worship, but as a practiced way of looking that keeps you responsive to a being who changes, resists, and surprises you. The chair stays put; the child doesn’t. The point is to stop expecting them to.