Gwen Stefani And Gavin Rossdale Don't Have A Great Co-Parenting Relationship

After Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale initiated their divorce in 2015, they had to parent their kids while leading separate lives. When some celebrities split up, they set aside their differences for the sake of their children and learn to cooperate with each other without being partners. They can even make us marvel over their ability to remain friends with their exes; co-parenting pros Demi Moore and Bruce Willis and Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin are examples of former spouses who are comfortable hanging out with each other.

But sometimes, deep wounds can make being friends with an ex impossible. Per Us Weekly, Stefani dumped Rossdale because she learned that he was cheating on her with their children's nanny. Even so, in a 2017 interview with The Sun, Rossdale said that he had hoped to save their marriage. "The one thing — the only good thing, because everything else is not good — is we care about the children and it's about them," he said. "So we do everything to make this life change as seamless as possible."

Different schedules and living situations can also complicate matters when it comes to co-parenting, such as when Stefani began dating her now-husband Blake Shelton and started spending a lot of time on his ranch in Oklahoma. After Stefani and Shelton settled into their new lives as husband and wife, Rossdale revealed that any hope of having an amicable co-parenting relationship with his ex had totally evaporated.

In June 2023, Gavin Rossdale shared an update on how co-parenting has been going for him, and it was far from hella good. On the "Not So Hollywood" podcast, Rossdale said that he and Gwen Stefani aren't actually co-parenting at all. Because of their ideological differences, each parent has apparently decided to do their own thing whenever it's their turn to have custody of their sons, Kingston, Zuma, and Apollo. Rossdale doesn't believe this is necessarily a bad thing. "We're really different people ... I don't think there's much similarity in the way we bring them up, but I think that gives them an incredible perspective to then choose which pieces of those two lives they'd like to inherit and move on with," he said.

Rossdale didn't elaborate on the different viewpoints that he and Stefani share, but when they attended mediation in 2018, People reported that it was related to the exes' views on religion. Stefani has been outspoken about how important her faith is to her and how it influenced the music she made after her divorce. While speaking to Time about recording her album "This Is What the Truth Feels Like," she recalled thinking, "I'm channeling God, this is saving my life." As for Rossdale, he's not religious. "I could never deal with the God thing, even from a young age," he said on the "POV with Gwen Singer" podcast. "It just made no sense to me."

When he appeared on "Trunk Nation" in April 2020, Gavin Rossdale revealed that sharing custody of kids during a pandemic was a logistical nightmare for him. At the time, Kingston, Zuma, and Apollo had been with Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton in Oklahoma for nearly two weeks, while Rossdale and Stefani usually swapped custody every five days. For the Bush frontman, not being able to spend time with his kids wasn't his only issue with the arrangement. "I know who's around me and know who's bringing the corona — no one – but you send your kids out, and now they're coming back to you and now you're prone to whoever they're with," he explained. But by July 2020, he told ET Canada that he had become somewhat less concerned about social distancing and was allowing his sons' friends to come over.

As for Stefani, she was unhappy with the couple's custody agreement from the start, complaining about how unfair it was that the arrangement compounded her post-divorce pain. "It was so insane because not only did my family break up, but then my kids are taken away like half the time, so that was really like, 'What?! What did I do?'" she told Harper's Bazaar. It sounds like there's no chance of a simple kind of life for the exes, but at least they're both getting to spend quality time with their boys.