Kristen Bell Explains Why Her Daughters Delta & Lincoln Share One Bedroom

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that when you're an award-winning actor married to another award-wining actor, you can likely afford a home with plenty of bedrooms and bathrooms for all. But, as it turns out, Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard's daughters share a bedroom. However, this sleeping arrangement isn't a result of a lack of funds or space — the Bell/Shepard family has both — but rather a character-building exercise.

While speaking with Hannah Dylan Pasternak for Self magazine's "Sleeping With..." series, Bell recently revealed that 6-year-old Lincoln and 5-year-old Delta share one bedroom. "It's very important to me that they share a bedroom," Bell told the magazine. "I think their lives will be easier than most other people's on the planet, and to develop a good character, it's important to always be going through something."

For now, that something is learning to share their space. "I like the fact that they will have to figure out how to share a bedroom, figure out how to share your closet, figure out how to share your space," Bell continued. "If that’s the worst thing about your life, that you have to share a bedroom with your sister, you're going to be OK."

The Good Place alum said she and Shepard have made it a point to talk "very candidly" about the various problems people continue to face or have faced in the world. "All people, period," Bell stressed, adding that she'd learned it was best not to ignore things after reading a chapter titled, "Why White Parents Don't Talk to Their Kids About Race" in the book NurtureShock.

Bell and Shepard purchased a four bedroom, four and a half bathroom home in 2017, according to Apartment Therapy. Later, in a 2019 interview with House Beautiful, Bell described the decor she'd chosen for her daughters' room as being "really fun and vibrant, like them." It included a vintage right blue Azilal rug, red metal bunk beds (which Shepard has previously shown off on his Instagram), and a creamy-colored wallpaper with tiny geometric red polka dots and triangles. "It's not a baby pink room," she said.

While Bell ultimately designed her daughters' bedroom herself, she confessed to Architectural Digest in May 2019 that her efforts to involve Lincoln and Delta in the process didn't pan out due to differences in vision. "In a dream world if you have dream kids, you say to them, 'What would you like in your bedroom?' And then they pick something cute. That is not how it unfolded," Bell told the publication about her efforts to collaborate with her kids on a bedroom design. "I was looking through pictures, and they were trying to explain what they wanted. And I roughly got a sketch in crayon of, like, a slide and a ball pit."

Bell joked that her kids seemed to be under the impression that they were "building a Chuck E. Cheese" rather than choosing curtains and a color scheme. "They didn't get it," she told Architectural Digest.

Of course, one might also argue that not getting the slide and ball pit bedroom of your dreams could qualify as "going through something" and lead to more opportunities for character building.