Lake Bell shares ‘key to co-parenting’ with ex-husband – CNET – ApparelGeek

Teamwork is the source of a dream job. Bell Lake spoke exclusively to We Weekly on parenthood amid her divorce — revealing her best advice.

“I think respect and communication is the key to co-parenting,” the 43-year-old star said. We while promoting his new movie Addition.

In the coming-of-age film, Bell plays a single mother who refuses to tell her daughter about her father’s absence. In real life, the actress says she’s “very close” with her ex-husband james campbellwith whom she shares daughter Nova, 7, and son Ozgood, 5. The couple announced their divorce in October 2020, and Bell has since moved on with Chris Rock. Children, however, always come first.

The New York native explained that she and Campbell, 45, never think they’re done working on their relationship as parents. “[We can] never think, ‘Oh, we had this conversation which was good, and therefore, now we are good for the rest of our lives.’ It’s an evolution, you know? she says. “It’s a constant, it’s any report, but it’s, like, the most important report of my life. It is for the good of our children. »

Bell is a busy mother. In addition to starring in Summering, she was nominated for an Emmy Award after directing episodes of Hulu’s Pam & Tommy; she voices Poison Ivy opposite Kaley Cuoco on HBO Max’s Harley Quinn; and her five-hour audiobook, Inside Voice: My Obsession With How We Sound, is slated for release in November.

“The biggest challenge for me is slowing down… Everything in our society — and even the culture — is kind of on a beat and parenting is always more successful when you slow down the f–k,” she told Us exclusively.

“My practice is to slow down, and when we slow down, we become more aware and are available to really listen and really digest and then react accordingly, you know?” Bell continued. “That’s the big challenge, isn’t it? Your kids are desperate to be seen and heard, like all of us, but you can’t do that if you’re moving really fast and trying to do too much.

Balancing isn’t easy, but the actress said she makes sure her kids know what to expect each week. She knows it’s a privilege to be able to create a structure for her little ones in this way.

“I have infrastructure, which I’m very grateful for,” Bell explained. “Our caregivers, my ex-husband and I are really close. We are good friends. Like, we work together. There’s a business running, you know? And so to make sure the kids feel like they know what the week is going to be, what the schedule is, they don’t feel like they’re upset. It really is the job.

She revealed that this process actually helped her ‘mommy guilt’ fade away. “Balancing it is really realizing that you can’t be everywhere at all times, right? So you’re building an infrastructure that allows you to be in one place at a time. I have to say, I don’t feel mommy guilt anymore because I see them blossoming,” the screenwriter explained. And I think there’s this respect for this is your life. So you show them, you live it to the fullest. You write the stories you want to create, you direct things, you direct projects on your own. You engage with the world and with the culture. And it is a necessity for me to be a happy person and therefore to be a happy mother.

What really brought joy to the working mother was doing Summering with the director James Ponsoldt, a longtime friend. “I respect him as a filmmaker and I really like the idea of ​​the two of us as parents, kind of taking the lens of independent cinema and kind of focusing it on a children’s adventure story kinda cross-generational and 90% female-based,” Bell said.

“He made this movie for his daughter,” she added. “I have a little girl and a son and I have a movie like Summering where we can both watch it. We can all watch it. And when there are scary bits, it’s going to inspire a conversation about fear and anxiety. And at the end of the two and a half years that we have just done, this is reflected on several levels.

Addition hits theaters on August 12.

With reporting by Christina Garibaldi