Olivia Wilde was seen alongside her former partner, Jason Sudeikis, this week in a co-parenting appearance, even as the internet buzzed with news that her ex-boyfriend, Harry Styles, had reportedly become engaged to Zoë Kravitz.
The timing made for a striking tableau, but the real story is one that millions of families navigate every single day: two people who once shared a life choosing, again and again, to show up together for their children.
In Page Six’s report on the public sighting, Wilde and Sudeikis — who dated from 2011 until their split in 2020 — share two children: son Otis, 12, and daughter Daisy, 9. The Ted Lasso star and the director-turned-actress have maintained a visible co-parenting presence since their separation, and this week was no different.
Why Co-parenting Is Harder Than It Looks
What Wilde and Sudeikis are doing in public may look effortless, but family therapists are quick to point out that functional co-parenting is anything but automatic. Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist Bren M. Chasse, writing for GoodTherapy.org, describes the emotional and psychological demands of effective co-parenting as requiring a level of maturity in which each person sets aside ego and personal grievances to present a unified front to their children. Separations that appear outwardly civil can still surface powerful emotions — grief, anger, and a sense of loss — that parents must work through while simultaneously helping their children do the same, Chasse notes.
Heather Hetchler, cited in Chasse’s piece on GoodTherapy.org, put it plainly: “Co-parenting is not a competition. It’s a collaboration of two homes working together with the best interest of the child at heart.”
That framing matters because the stakes for children are genuinely high. Research published in a peer-reviewed framework on co-parenting and child outcomes in PMC identifies four core dimensions of the co-parenting relationship: how much parents support versus undermine each other, how they handle differences in child-rearing values, how they divide parental responsibilities, and how they manage conflict in front of their children.
Researchers found that the quality of co-parenting is more powerfully linked to children’s well-being than the overall quality of the couple relationship itself, meaning that two people who genuinely dislike each other can still protect their children if they commit to functional co-parenting practices.
What the Research Says About Children’s Mental Health
The connection between co-parenting quality and children’s mental health is well-documented. Experts at HelpGuide.org point out that children’s rates of anxiety and depression are directly shaped by how well their parents function together after a split, and advise parents to mentally reframe their dynamic with an ex as an entirely new kind of partnership, one built entirely around the child rather than around the adults’ history.
HelpGuide acknowledges that putting aside relationship issues to co-parent agreeably is sometimes easier said than done, but emphasizes that for the sake of children’s wellbeing, it is possible to overcome co-parenting challenges and develop a cordial working relationship with an ex.
HelpGuide also emphasizes that joint custody arrangements, while often exhausting and emotionally fraught, become more manageable when parents commit to a cordial working relationship, not for their own sake, but because children’s sense of security depends on seeing both parents cooperate.
Practical guidance from family experts consistently emphasizes a few non-negotiable behaviors: never speak negatively about the other parent in front of the children, maintain consistent rules and consequences across both households, and show up together for major milestones rather than forcing children to choose.
Chasse is particularly emphatic on that last point, writing that children need to know they are valued enough that both parents will set aside discomfort to celebrate them.
Celebrity Co-parenting Under a Microscope
For public figures like Wilde and Sudeikis, every school pickup and shared outing becomes a subject of media scrutiny, adding a layer of pressure most families never face. Yet in some ways, their visibility also makes them an unlikely model.
When two people who have been through a very public split, followed by a very public new relationship for one of them, can still be photographed together at a child’s event without apparent drama, it sends a message that the work is possible.
The PMC research framework underscores that co-parenting quality is a modifiable factor, meaning it is not fixed by how badly a relationship ended or how much conflict existed during the split.
Parents who invest in improving their co-parenting dynamic, whether through therapy, structured communication tools, or simply committing to child-focused interactions, can meaningfully improve outcomes for their kids at any stage.
Why Co-Parenting Matters
The Wilde and Sudeikis sighting will quickly fade from the tabloid cycle, but the underlying story it illustrates is one that affects roughly half of all families with children in the United States.
The research is detailed: children do not need their parents to be in love, or even to be friends. They need their parents to be functional partners in the specific, bounded project of raising them. That is a skill, not a feeling — and it can be learned, practiced, and improved regardless of what else is happening in either parent’s personal life.
