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.”
Last year, the couple documented nightmare travel woes when they were left “stranded” overnight in Boston.
The family of four were “kicked out” of the Logan International Airport after making “quite a home” at their gate, so they accepted an offer to stay in a friends’ attic.
Bell and Shepard, 49, welcomed Lincoln and Delta in 2013 and 2014, respectively.
While the duo choose to keep their kids’ faces off of social media, that doesn’t stop them from sharing stories about their parenting experiences — and clapping back at online haters.
After the “Good Place” alum revealed last year that Delta and Lincoln drink non-alcoholic beer, her husband defended the decision on his “Armchair Expert” podcast.
“If anyone has a problem … that’s fine with me,” the actor, 49, said in 2023. “I’m not going to change based on what anybody else says because this is our family and not your business.”
In 2020, Bell hit back at criticism over her youngest daughter still wearing diapers at age 5, tweeting that her admission wasn’t “humiliating” because “everyone is different.”
