Kristen Bell Wants Her Daughters to 'Have Good, Healthy, Positive, Happy, Wild Sex' One Day
As their daughters grow up, Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell have had to field some tough questions.
On Monday’s WTF with Marc Maron podcast, the actress revealed how she and her husband talk to their girls Delta, 3½, and Lincoln, 5, about topics like death and sex — in fact, when it comes to the latter, Bell hopes all the best for her girls in the future and will be there to give them information when they ask for it.
“They’ve asked about sex before and Dax says, ‘Well, there’s a penis, there’s a vagina and there’s an ovum and there’s ejaculate,’ ” explained The Good Place star, 38. “And they’re like, ‘Can I have some juice?!’ They’re just off of it. They don’t care.”
She added about inevitably having the conversation again with Delta and Lincoln in the future, “That’s fine. Sex is wonderful. I want my kids to have sex. I want them to have good, healthy, positive, happy, wild sex.”
Want all the latest pregnancy and birth announcements, plus celebrity mom blogs? Click here to get those and more in the PEOPLE Parents newsletter.
The spouses’ dedication to honesty where their kids are concerned extends to most aspects of their life, and recently, that included a difficult discussion about the circle of life.
“He’s dying of prostate cancer,” Bell told the host of Shepard’s stepfather, who has since died, in May (his biological father died of lung cancer five years ago). “But we’re prepared, as a family. It’s been years coming. … We have all sort of made peace with it, and we’ve talked to our kids about it. They know that Papa’s gonna die.”
“In fact, a couple days ago in the car, my oldest daughter said, ‘Will Delta and I be around when we bury Papa?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, you guys will. We’ll go up to Oregon and we have what’s called a funeral and there’s a casket and sometimes they open it and you’ll see Papa’s body and he won’t be in it.’ … We’re very honest with them.”
“And she said, ‘Okay, so we’ll be there when you bury him … do I need to bring my gardening stuff? I have a shovel. Where do we do it? The side of the house?’ ” Bell continued. “And it was so practical. I slammed on my brakes, I was laughing so hard.”
RELATED VIDEO: Kristen Bell Shares Private Photos of Her Second Pregnancy to Mark Daughter Delta’s Birthday
“I was also so proud,” she raved of Lincoln. “She was like, ‘Well, one of our own is going, I guess we all participate.’ Her frontal lobe was firing about how to handle this and I thought that was so wonderful for a 5-year-old.”
“What I really want to give to my kids is the science of [death] and the critical thinking of it,” said the Veronica Mars actress, who was raised on a more religious view of what happens after someone dies.
“[Lincoln] asked before, when she was 4, she said, ‘Am I gonna die?’ ” Bell continued. “And Dax and I both lost our breath for a minute and we were like, ‘This is the moment. This is the moment we start to spin the fantasy of something else — do we do it, or can we brave this water and say, “Yeah, we all die. That’s what happens. It won’t be for a hundred years, so you don’t need to worry about it.” ‘ “
The experience did involve a few tears, but luckily they were short-lived. “We said that and she cried for about 10 seconds and then she went, ‘[Sniffles] Where are my PAW Patrol toys?‘ And it was not a thing.”
The Good Place returns to NBC Sept. 27 with a special 1-hour premiere at 8 p.m. EST.
