Kristen Bell believes in keeping an open relationship with her daughters.
Appearing on REAL SIMPLE’s first-ever celebrity cover, the Frozen star, 42, talked about why she thinks keeping total honesty with her kids is one of her keys to parenting.
“I hate the word ‘taboo.’ I think it should be stricken from the dictionary,” she tells the outlet. “There should be no topic that’s off the table for people to talk about.”
Bell notes that conversations she and husband Dax Shepard have with daughters Delta, 8, and Lincoln, 9½, might be “shocking” for some, but make sense for her parenting style.
“I know it’s shocking, but I talk to my kids about drugs, and the fact that their daddy is an addict and he’s in recovery, and we talk about sex,” she says. “There are all these ‘hard topics’ that don’t have to be if you give the person on the other end your vulnerability and a little bit of credit.
The Good Place actress later discusses why some of the rules that she and the Armchair Expert co-host, 48, have for their family are about teaching life skills.
“Making amends and apologizing is an important thing in our family, because humans leave carnage wherever they go,” Bell says. “I really respect when someone does something wrong or hurtful and they apologize. I’m like, ‘Yeah, right on.’ That’s important.”
Bell continues, “If there’s one thing I want to teach my kids, it’s how to make amends — and that it’s for themselves, so they can like who’s in the mirror a little bit more.”
In a recent chat with PEOPLE about Hello Bello‘s first ever State of Parenthood report — a family goods company the two co-founded to bring better parenting experiences to all — the mom of two noted she’s enjoying the “comedic surprises” that her girls deliver.
“It’s like living in a Jim Carrey movie,” she laughed. “Yesterday, I had to say out loud, ‘Could you please stop using my toothbrush to wash your legs?’ I said that. I never thought I would utter that sentence, but here we are.”
“The fact that I know that there are other people out there who know why I had to say that and why I was a completely legitimate sentence. I don’t know, it makes me feel a little bit more at peace.”
Shepard noted that he’s enjoying how the girls are “increasingly not parroting what they heard.”
“They’re creating novel ideas and thoughts. And so there’s two more interesting people in the house that are computing the world differently than us and they can communicate it now. And it’s really fun just to have more perspectives around. They’re becoming more like bros for me.”
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