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Kristen Bell has opened up about trying out a new parenting technique with her husband Dax Shepard.
The Good Place actress recently revealed on Jimmy Kimmel Live! that while on vacation in Denmark with their two daughters, Lincoln, 11, and Delta, nine, they allowed their children to be by themselves at a theme park for hours.
“We stayed at this hotel that was right at Tivoli Gardens,” Bell said. “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?’”
Free-range parenting is a method that sees children spending chunks of time by themselves with the goal of increasing independence and learning responsibility for their actions at an early age.
The Veronica Mars alum explained that with her own children, they would wake up at 6 am and get ready for the day alone. “They scanned their bracelets to go outside,” she continued. “[We] didn’t see them for seven hours. Just running around Copenhagen.”
Bell called her free-range parenting experience “heaven” as she and Shepard would just drink coffee and play cards until late in the afternoon.
“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,” she said.
Bell also emphasized that everyone made it home from vacation and both of her daughters “are alive.”
The actress also noted the more lax policies at the Danish amusement park, and that children were “allowed on the rides without an adult.”
This isn’t the first time Bell has shared her parenting decisions. In June, she told how she and Shepard told their children about death. During an interview with E! News, she explained that the two of them never lie to their children, regardless of what questions they ask them.
“It requires a lot of brain power because you have to filter what’s appropriate for their age group, what isn’t going to scare them too much, but just maybe enough. You have to make all these quick calls, all these blank decisions, and it’s hard,” she said.
“When my daughter first asked us: ‘What happens when we die?’ My husband and I looked at each other and we were like: ‘What tale do we choose?’”
She revealed exactly how the two of them answered that question, saying, “We were like: ‘We don’t know. You might just become flowers, but you might end.’”
Although she didn’t initially know how to answer the question, the Frozen actress was shocked by her daughter’s response. “She cried for a minute. Then she went: ‘Okay,’” Bell said. “I still can’t believe we got through that.”
Her daughters have also asked her where babies come from, although she admitted they wanted to end the conversation very quickly after Bell started giving them a truthful answer.
“One kid asked us and Dax started explaining the sperm meets the ovum,” she explained. “And truly, within 30 seconds, she had walked outside because she was so bored. So it’s worked in our favor, and we’re going to keep it up as long as we can.”
