Everything Josh Lucas and Ex Jessica Ciencin Henriquez Have Said About Co-Parenting Their Son
Josh Lucas and his ex-wife Jessica Ciencin Henriquez have mastered the art of co-parenting.
The couple, who split in January 2014 and divorced that October, have been open in the past about how they make it work when it comes to tag-teaming the care of their 5½-year-old son Noah Rev.
“We are both totally committed to raising our son and being in love with our son,” Lucas, 46, recently told PEOPLE. “I do believe our relationship will be constantly changing. It’s a very remarkably complex period of my life and Jess’ life that we’re doing the best we possibly can to keep his life stable.”
One way they make this work is through “bird-nest” parenting — where Noah stays at his N.Y.C. home and his parents rotate in and out, just like nesting birds.
“It’s a concept that’s fairly new, particularly in the psychology of raising a child in divorce,” Lucas added. “And the idea is, it’s really not the child’s fault that you got divorced.”
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“It’s really interesting,” Lucas continued. “Rarely, do both parents, particularly if they’re divorced, get to have as much interaction with their children. We’re really, truly doing the split custody thing, and have been so lucky to soak up all that time with Noah.”
As for little Noah? “He loves it,” Lucas says. “He doesn’t love us being separated but he loves that he has his bed and his toys and his dog. It’s his life.”
A post shared by Josh Lucas (@jlucasthe) on Feb 13, 2018 at 5:51am PST
This isn’t the first time Lucas has spoken about the former couple’s co-parenting style. In 2014, he told PEOPLE, “We’re just basically now at a point where we’re co-parenting in a way that’s thoroughly and amazingly enjoyable.”
“We have been through a divorce and divorce isn’t something I would wish on my worst enemy, even when in our case we have managed to do it amicably,” the Sweet Home Alabama star said that same year.
“We will be connected forever. Fully. We have both worked hard to be great friends, particularly because we have a young child that we both truly love,” Lucas added. “We are the most connected broken family I have ever seen.”
A post shared by Josh Lucas (@jlucasthe) on Jan 8, 2018 at 4:31pm PST
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Henriquez, a writer, has been candid about her relationship with Lucas through articles published in O, The Oprah Magazine, The New York Times and more.
“When we married in 2012, we knew the risk of putting on wedding rings was that we might one day take them off,” she wrote in O for their March 2017 issue. “When that risk became our reality, we were determined, for our son’s sake, to divorce differently.”
The former spouses “shuffled [their] boy back and forth” for two years until deciding to sign one-year leases for two units in the same Harlem brownstone.
“It took living together again to make me less dependent on him; it took us not being married for him to become more considerate of me,” Henriquez added, admitting it was a rocky road between being separated and not at first.
A post shared by Josh Lucas (@jlucasthe) on Nov 9, 2016 at 11:24am PST
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“The details of our custody arrangement were decided in our lawyer’s office before I moved out,” Henriquez recalled in a February 2015 post for NYT. “Our child hadn’t even begun preschool, yet we’re already assigned the next two decades of holidays and class breaks, divvying them up evenly; the odd years were mine.”
“I’ve never doubted my ex-husband’s ability to care for our son. After all, he was the one who taught me how to change a diaper and take a temperature,” she wrote. “If he’d been half the husband that he was a father, we would have made it to our golden wedding anniversary and been buried side by side.”
“I wasn’t worried about him, nearly as much as I was about me,” Henriquez continued. “I questioned my ability to stop parenting, even for a moment. If there was a mothering switch, I hadn’t yet found the dimmer.”
Beginning Instagram with one of my favorite photos of all time
A post shared by Josh Lucas (@jlucasthe) on Dec 5, 2015 at 5:35am PST
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In a November 2014 parenting blog for NYT, the mother of one admitted she’d “never considered what would happen if I divorced the man who’d made me a mother.”
But, she wrote, “Just because our marriage was broken didn’t mean that our family had to be,” recounting a time when Noah was sick and the two had to come together regardless of their marital issues.
“We spent the remainder of the weekend working as a team while we silently nursed our child back to health.” Henriquez explained. “Being together was no longer about us.”
