Kristen Bell “Can’t Believe” How She Got Through Her Daughter’s Question About Death

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard have long held the belief that honesty is the best policy when it comes to their kids. Their two daughters, 11-year-old Lincoln and 9-year-old Delta, have known the truth about Santa for years and have had conversations with their parents about the Armchair Expert host’s past struggles with addiction since they were little. But when one of their daughters asked them a big question about death, they weren’t immediately sure how to answer.

In a recent interview with E! News, the Good Place actress opened up about the couple’s decision to never lie to their daughters. “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,” Bell said. “You have to make all these quick calls, all these blank decisions, and it’s hard.”

One such hard decision was when her daughter Lincoln, when she was 5 years old, asked what about death. “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?’” Bell told the outlet, going on to explain that they decided to tell her they really didn’t know all the answers.

“And then we were like, ‘We don’t know. You might just become flowers, but you might end,’” she told E! News. Bell added that Lincoln “cried for a minute,” but ultimately accepted their answer. “Then she went, ‘Okay.’ I still can’t believe we got through that.”

During an appearance on Late Night With Seth Meyers in 2020, Bell said that hearing her daughter’s question about death was like “the air got sucked out of the room.”

“We were like, ‘This is it. What do we do?’ There are so many roads. Like, do we make up a story? Do we say we don’t know? Do we say we know and then actually not know?” Bell told host Seth Meyers. “And we just said, ‘Yes, you’re gonna die.’ And she went, ‘Ugh…’ And then we said, ‘And we really don’t know what happens when you die. You may just become flowers.’” Bell told Meyers that they “were so relieved” by Lincoln’s reaction to such a big question “because we did make a commitment never to lie to them.”

The couple has stuck to their promise to never to lie to their daughters, and sometimes the boring nature of the full truth has worked in their favor. In 2019, during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, Bell and Shepard recalled how they explained the inevitable question every kid will someday ask. “[Lincoln] said, ‘Well, where do babies come from?’” Bell told Ellen DeGeneres at the time. “We were like, ‘Real talk, sit down.’”

“We went through the anatomy. Penis, vagina, ovum, sperm,” Shepard added. We’re laying it all out. We get right to the action...” Bell then chimed in, “And she’s like ‘OK, I gotta go outside.’ And she just left ... We bored her to death.”

Hey, sometimes hearing the truth is hard and sometimes it’s boring as heck. And that’s a life lesson in and of itself.