Jana Kramer says Los Angeles priced her out of the childhood she wanted for her kids.
The 42-year-old actress and country singer, who relocated to Nashville, Tennessee with her family, said that financial constraints in California kept her from giving Jolie, 8, and Jace, 6 — her children with ex-husband Mike Caussin — the kind of upbringing she remembered from her own Michigan childhood. Kramer, who also shares son Roman with husband Allan Russell, explained that even in Studio City she couldn’t stretch her budget far enough.
“I remember being in Studio City with the two kids, and we couldn’t afford to have a bigger place with a bigger backyard and neighborhoods like that,” she said in the interview. “Again, we just couldn’t afford certain neighborhoods and, for me, Tennessee has just always been a place that every time I land, my nervous system just like relaxes, it feels calm.”
Kramer grew up in the Midwest, and those roots shaped what she hoped to recreate for her children. She described struggling with the gap between her memories and her California reality, particularly the freedom of “running around my neighborhood and just going from friend’s house to friend’s house” and staying out “until the sun went down.”
That version of childhood proved unattainable in Los Angeles, where housing costs and neighborhood layouts closed off the possibility. Since the move, she has watched her children reclaim something closer to her own experience.
“On their bikes and going to their friends houses,” she said, describing what she now sees. “It just makes me feel like home.”
Kramer acknowledged that Los Angeles works for other families she knows, and “that’s amazing for them.” Her own preference, she made clear, leans toward what she found in Tennessee — a “totally different life” that echoes her Michigan upbringing and the values she absorbed there.
“I love it here,” she added. “You can always go back. You can always go to Hollywood, but things have changed so much with self-tapes, which I actually don’t love, but you can. It’s a plane away.”
The relocation conversation came up during Kramer’s promotional push for “The One,” her new film hitting theaters nationwide on Nov. 5, which coincides with national homeless youth awareness month. The movie follows an 18-year-old navigating homelessness after aging out of the foster care system, a storyline that resonated with Kramer on multiple levels.
“I remember reading the script and just, I love a complicated story, you know, I think it’s always fun to play those roles because life is complex,” she shared. “But I loved the story behind it. I loved the faith element. It wasn’t completely thrown in your face, but it was a beautiful thread throughout the movie. And it just had a lot of heart to it.”
Kramer said she “felt that pain that everyone was going through” and wanted to help tell that story. The film’s timing amplifies its subject matter, and she pointed to the emotional weight of portraying instability through a young person’s eyes.
The actress described the character’s experience as “heartbreaking” — the sense of “not having a home base” and living with the knowledge that at “any second the rug can be pulled from underneath them.”
“I just… I can’t imagine that as a kid,” she said. “It’s like I think about my kids, and it makes me sad to think about. Them not feeling safe or them being put into unsafe homes because our job as parents is to protect them. And it makes me really sad that, some kids in the foster system don’t get placed into safe homes and those that have to hop around.”
Kramer’s own move to Nashville came after her highly publicized divorce from Caussin, a former NFL player, following multiple cheating scandals and a brief reconciliation. The couple, who married in 2015, weathered Caussin’s sex addiction treatment and a 2016 separation before calling it quits for good in 2021. She became engaged to Scottish soccer coach Allan Russell in 2023, and the couple welcomed Roman that same year.
“The One” opens in theaters nationwide on Nov. 5.