Kristen Bell has opened up about the “psychological” holiday traditions she and her husband Dax Shepard are hoping to instil in their two children.
The Good Place star, 41, who shares daughters Lincoln, eight, and Delta, six, with the comedian, discussed their parenting techniques when it comes to the holiday season while speaking with Today, where she revealed that the couple’s goal is to teach their children to “reject the stress of the holidays”.
According to Bell, who revealed that the family partakes in holiday traditions such as matching pyjamas and Christmas movies, what the couple wants most is for their children to recognise that not everything has to be perfect.
To instil the reminder in their young children, Bell said she and Shepard try to engage in the behaviour themselves when the festive season comes around.
“We are attempting to model the behaviour for our kids to not get too uppity or too intent on things being perfect,” Bell explained, adding that she hopes her two daughters learn to “live with ease during this time where everyone is supposed to plug back in”.
As for the ways the couple shows their daughters that the holidays shouldn’t be a time of stress, Bell told the outlet that the entire family wears matching pyjamas and takes walks together on Christmas day, because they “want the whole day to be lazy”.
“We’ll do that in our holiday pyjamas and look like crazy people walking through the neighbourhood and we just don’t care,” the Frozen star said after revealing that, before she and Shepard became parents, she would buy them and their dogs matching pyjama sets.
The couple’s dedication to highlighting the importance of a stress-free holiday period comes after they recently revealed during a People and Parents magazine video that they also try to employ a laid-back approach in their everyday parenting.
While reflecting on what he wishes he’d known before becoming a parent, Shepard jokingly told the outlet that he would have liked to have been told that he will “never have anything nice again”.
“That would’ve been a good heads-up,” he continued. “If you like that there are no crumbs and toys on your floor, say goodbye to it. The quicker you come to accept that you’re gonna live in a pigsty and that everything will be vaguely broken – the quicker you can accept that, the happier the experience is. We fought it for like six months.”
The admission prompted Bell to confirm that trying to fight the mess is “not worth the stress”.
“You just gotta surrender, because if you spend your whole time, you’re gonna lose and you’re gonna be mentally fatigued,” she added. “Then your kids see that you’re stressed ‘cause objects are in different places.”
