Kristen Bell and Dax Shepherd have made a cottage industry out of oversharing about their relationship, their two daughters and their questionable parenting decisions. They’ve shared that they let their daughters, now aged 9 and 11, drink nonalcoholic beer, and that they don’t bathe them until they smell bad. In a recent interview on Jimmy Kimmel Live, Bell talked about how they let their daughters roam around an amusement park in Copenhagen by themselves for entire days, reasoning that it was fine because “they’re alive.”
Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard gave “free-range parenting” a try in Denmark.
While vacationing with daughters Lincoln, 11, and Delta, 9, the couple let the little ones roam around Tivoli Gardens on their own for hours at a time, Bell confessed on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Thursday.
“We stayed at this hotel that was right at Tivoli Gardens,” the actress, 44, explained to viewers of the seven-acre amusement park.
“The hotel opens up into the theme park and so we just were kind of like, ‘Are we going to free-range parenting and roll the die here?’” she recalled. “They woke up at like 6:00 every morning.
“They scanned their bracelets to go outside,” she continued. “[We] didn’t see them for seven hours. Just running around Copenhagen.”
The Golden Globe nominee called the experience “heaven,” explaining, “We just had coffee, we played Spades, and then around 3:00 we’d be like, ‘Anybody see them?’ And then one of them would run up and need a Band-Aid or whatever.”
When host Jimmy Kimmel asked whether “that was OK,” Bell joked that their children are “both alive” and the whole family “returned home.”
The “Veronica Mars” alum noted that the girls were “allowed on the rides without an adult” since “it’s real loosey goosey over there.”
Did the girls have cell phones that work in Europe and did they check in with them? (Update: probably not.) I guess it doesn’t matter because Bell is just going to tell a parenting story to get people outraged and then sit back and act like it’s everyone else’s problem. When my son was little we lived in Switzerland and Germany. Kids would regularly ride the public buses and trams by themselves, but they did so with a group of their friends. I would not let my son be alone at 9 or 11, even with a sibling, all day at an amusement park. An hour or two maybe, but I’m American and don’t adapt that easily. Plus I watch too much true crime. People argue that these places are safer than America and that it’s culturally acceptable to leave your kids to their own devices, similar to how it used to be in the US. I wouldn’t put it past Bell and Shepherd to have researched this park and taken this vacation just to have a story to tell about leaving their kids alone. It’s probably fine and it worked out fine, but this woman knows what she’s doing telling this story.
In another interview, with E! News, Bell said, of her 11-year marriage to Shepard, “We argue about absolutely everything, but there is a foundational trust that we’ve built that keeps us together and is quite stimulated by one another’s opinions.” That sounds kind of miserable to me.
Photos credit: Getty images for Netflix, Xavier Collin / Image Press Agency / Avalon