- Parks and Recreation alum Rashida Jones shares one child with her longtime partner, Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig.
- The couple welcomed their only son, Isaiah Jones Koenig, in 2018.
- Jones, the daughter of legendary music producer Quincy Jones and actress Peggy Lipton, has talked about wanting Isaiah to have space to be his own person like she did.
Rashida Jones and Ezra Koenig are proud parents. The two-time Emmy nominee and Vampire Weekend frontman share 6-year-old son Isaiah Jones Koenig, whom they welcomed in 2018, per People.
While Jones and her longtime partner prefer to keep their child out of the public eye, they’ve both opened up about how parenthood has changed their lives. Jones tragically lost her mother, actress Peggy Lipton, to cancer less than a year after welcoming Isaiah. In 2021, she described how Lipton’s death put her in a state of “grief-shock.”
“It’s very binary, both things—becoming a mother and losing my mother—like, there’s my life before and there’s my life after,” she shared with NPR in February of that year. “And strangely, there’s something that’s not recognizable before those two things happened. And it’s just this utter rawness of emotion where it doesn’t matter where I am, what I’m doing.
“If I’m overwhelmed by that grief or that joy, that’s it. I have to feel that thing. I can’t suppress it. I can’t run away from it. It’s just there.”
Quincy Jones, his daughter Rashida Jones, and his wife Peggy Lipton in 2012.
C Flanigan/FilmMagic
Koenig, 41, told People in 2024 that watching the generations before him grow elderly while welcoming the next generation as a parent finally made him feel like an adult. “I just think having those things on either side of you starts to make you realize, right, I’m neither a kid nor am I elderly. I’m an adult,” he said, adding, “We’re the grown-ups now. We’re the people.”
Like Jones—whose late father, Quincy Jones, was a legendary musician and music producer—young Isaiah has two famous parents. Still, the Sunny actress and “Capricorn” singer have tried to give their son a normal childhood, choosing not to post photos of him online or bring him to red carpets.
Here’s everything Jones and Koenig have shared about their son.
He’s growing up in Los Angeles.
Rashida Jones and Ezra Koenig at an event in 2016.
Todd Williamson/Getty Images
Jones and Koenig welcomed their son, Isaiah Jones Koenig, on August 22, 2018, in Los Angeles, per People.
L.A. serves as the family’s home base. Jones herself was born and raised there, but after going east to attend Harvard, she once thought she wouldn’t return to her hometown.
“I moved to New York right after college and always said I would never move back here as long as I lived,” she said in a 2011 interview with Los Angeles Magazine. “Of course, I did come back, and I’m very happy. …[Y]ou can come here and create a little world for yourself. It’s a very generous city.”
Her partner Koenig, a native New Yorker, described recording music in sunny L.A. as “particularly idyllic” in a 2019 GQ profile. “There’s moments where I’ve thought to myself: It kind of doesn’t get better than this. Like, spend the morning with your family, then you come to work in a place like this, hang out, and then you go back to your family,” he told the outlet.
His family briefly lived in Japan.
Rashida Jones and ‘Sunny’ co-star Hidetoshi Nishijima at a Tokyo photocall in 2024.
Jun Sato/WireImage
When Jones travels out of state for projects, Koenig and Isaiah often come along. The family lived in Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan while Jones filmed the Apple TV+ comedy series Sunny in 2022, and made special memories there.
“[O]ne day, I decided to get my husband and son out of the city and visit Nara, which is about 40 minutes south and home to a Shinto house called Kasuga Taisha and a temple, Tōdai-ji,” the Parks and Recreation alum recalled in a 2024 essay for Condé Nast Traveler.
After stopping to buy her son a toy at a vending machine carousel, the family arrived in Nara, where they were greeted with a breathtaking sight: a herd of deer. “The deer in Nara are part of the place,” Jones explained in the same essay. “You walk down the street and there will just be two of them taking a nap in front of a store. You can buy food and feed them. Some even got a little nippy with us! It was a very weird, magical scene.”
He got “very into drums” during the pandemic.
During the pandemic, Jones got to spend more time with her son while the world was shut down.
“I mean, [Isaiah] is really the only marker of time right now, ‘cause everything else is just so subjective,” she told host Jimmy Fallon in a January 2021 appearance on The Tonight Show. “But, you know, he’s becoming a person, and I get to see the whole thing, which is awesome.”
Rashida Jones and Ezra Koenig at a Grammys after party in February 2024.
Jerritt Clark/Getty Images for W Magazine
When Fallon asked if a then-2-year-old Isaiah had inherited his father and grandfathers’ musical talents, the Black Mirror actress offered a humorous answer. “He’s not tone deaf. So that’s the good news. You know what I mean?” she joked.
“I don’t know. Who knows what will be? He has a very good sense of melody and rhythm. He’s very into drums. I’m gonna call Ahmir,” Jones added, referencing Fallon’s house band frontman and drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.
Jones wants her son to “feel like he’s his own person.”
Rashida Jones at ‘Short List Shorts: Human Spirit 2024 DOC NYC’ in November 2024.
Santiago Felipe/Getty Images
As the daughter of two celebrities—Mod Squad star Peggy Lipton and legendary music producer Quincy Jones, who was nominated for a record 80 Grammy Awards—and a famous actress in her own right, Jones knows what it’s like to receive the ‘nepo baby’ label.
“People like the story of a legacy family and it’s fun to write about and it’s fun to think about, you know, the ‘mini me’ and the person who looks like their mom or their dad. And then there’s the resentment there too,” she told InStyle in 2024. “But I think about it as, historically, people go into the family business more than they don’t.”
While Jones ended up following in her mother’s footsteps, joining the entertainment industry after graduating from Harvard, she and Koenig aren’t putting any pressure on Isaiah to do the same. In a 2024 New Yorker interview, the 49-year-old said her parents “prioritized the right things. We weren’t overly spoiled, indulged, coddled. They were super loving. We travelled a ton, and that’s something I want to give my son.
“I want [Isaiah] to feel like he’s his own person,” Jones continued. “My parents were very encouraging about that. My dad wanted me to have my own life and career and not to live in his shadow. He’s got a big, big, big shadow. But he managed to give me the space and the love to be my own person. And that’s why I was able to do it.”
