Jewel Says Co-Parenting with Ex Ty Murray ‘Takes Active Work’: Children ‘Deserve Both Parents’

Jewel and her ex Ty Murray may not be in a relationship with each other, but they are dedicated to keeping their communication open for the sake of their son Kase Townes, 5?.

“I try and imagine the person that I fell in love with — there’s so many great things about him,” the “You Were Meant for Me” songstress tells PEOPLE Now.

“He’s a great person and he’s a great dad, and so you really focus on those things — focus on that more than the differences that led to us splitting.”

Adds Jewel, 42, “ deserve both parents. They deserve to know that their parents respect each other, if nothing else. So that really helps me set the standard of how I try and behave.”

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Jewel and Murray were together for 16 years and married for six of those before announcing their split in 2014.

“It’s not easy. It takes active work,” Jewel — who is currently dating American football quarterback Charlie Whitehurst, 34 — admits of co-parenting with Murray, who is a professional rodeo cowboy.

She continues, “You don’t get divorced ’cause everything’s going great, so it really does take a willing choice and following through on .”

The last family vacation the singer took involved her little guy and some active time in the mountains.

“Telluride, Colorado, where I have a house,” she says. “My son and I have been skiing. He’s 5, and watching a 5-year-old ski is like watching kittens in bathtubs, or something adorable. So it’s been really fun.”

Jewel told PEOPLE in 2016 that maintaining a positive relationship with Murray for the sake of their son is “about realizing you’re in a relationship forever, so learning to treat one another with respect and dignity and just doing the right thing for Kase.”

She explained, “Going through a divorce really caused me to say, ‘What kind of woman am I? What kind of woman do I want my son to know?’ ”

“I wanted him, as he goes through his life, to have permission to redraw himself as many times as he needs. We have many chapters in our life, and we actually get to rewrite them.”