Joshua Jackson Opened Up About Co-Parenting & The Response Has Been Very Mixed

Joshua Jackson is opening up about divorce, being a single dad, and co-parenting — as well as what it’s like to raise a child when you didn’t grow up with a great father figure. But while many of his fans are touched by his vulnerability and candidness, others are calling him out for perhaps implying that doing his fair share is a sacrifice.

The Doctor Odyssey star appeared on Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s Dinner’s On Me podcast this week where he described what it’s like to parent a child when you don’t know how it feels to get love from your dad.

“I am surprised at how much of the experience of fatherhood is self-healing,” he said. “It’s my job, shared with my ex-wife, to do everything we can to nurture you, cultivate you, and give you all the tools you need in life. But man, it is not lost on me that I am getting an opportunity to experience a father’s love in a way that I never experienced it.”

Jackson, who usually keeps pretty quiet about fatherhood and his personal life, married British actor Jodie Turner-Smith in 2019 and they welcomed their daughter Juno in 2020. Turner-Smith filed for divorce in 2023.

“My father’s response to difficulty was to run away. And instead of doing that, I’ve had the opportunity to give my daughter the opposite experience,” he continued. “In our generation, it was always the women who raised the kids,” Jackson continued. “I am now a grown man with a child. I have my father who I never became close with, who passed away. And I find myself for the first time with a great deal of sympathy for him. Because the pain that he must have lived with, to have four children in the world and essentially no relationship with any of them.”

Jackson lived in his childhood home in Los Angeles until January, when it was lost in the wildfires. He’s planning on rebuilding, and even said he’s looking forward to a new start post-divorce with his daughter. It’s clear that she’s at the center of his life now.

“If I ever did anything to estrange my daughter from myself, I would be in duress. I actually can't conceive of it because I don't even wanna think of the pain that that would be,” he said. “Regardless of how messy the divorce is, beautiful the divorce is, easy, hard the coparenting is, I think this generation of dads is understanding, like 'I need to be here. It's gonna be hard, but this is important, and I've got to do this.’ For me, there’s no other option. It’s the great and beautiful purpose of my life.”

It was this last comment that had some people giving the interview the side-eye.

“It’s a sad day when this is seen as an admirable thing,” one popular comment on Reddit read. “That baby is 50% yours so you need to be there.”

“Sooo this generation of men understands being a father means....being a father???Got it,” wrote another.

“Why is this man talking like taking care of his own child like it's an admirable sacrifice that he's willing to do,” another said.

But other fans defended the Dawson’s Creek star, explaining that the he was simply expressing how important it was for him to love and care for his daughter after being raised by an emotionally and physically absent father after his parents divorced.

“He said this in direct comparison to his own father who abandoned him and his siblings back in the 80s without a second thought after his parents marriage broke up,” someone explained.

Sure, perhaps this generation of dads is the first to step up and try to raise their children with more equal time and effort. And of course Jackson shouldn’t be praised for giving his daughter love, care, and attention. But it’s also important to put his comments into context: he’s trying to father after not having a role model to guide him — and that’s both challenging and admirable.