Kristen Bell & Dax Shepard Let Their Kids Wander A Theme Park Alone — And We Should All Be Taking Notes

During a Sept. 20 appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Kristen Bell shared some of the highlights of her summer vacation. These included visiting Denmark, Iceland and Norway with her husband, Dax Shepard, and the pair’s 9- and 11-year-old daughters.

Bell noted that travel with kids often doesn’t feel like much of a vacation for their parents: “You’re just watching your kids in a different city.” But she explained to Kimmel that she and Shepard had come across a “hack” that bought them a break from the relentless responsibilities of parenting.

“When we went to Copenhagen, we stayed at this hotel that was right at Tivoli Gardens, which is like a 7-acre theme park,” Bell explained.

“The hotel opens up into the theme park, and so we were just kind of, like, are we going to, like, free-range parenting and roll the die here?”

And they did, letting the girls loose in the amusement park every morning and not seeing them again until the afternoon.

Bell and Shepard are no strangers to the free-range parenting philosophy. Shepard has even featured Lenore Skenazy, the woman who coined the term, as a guest on his podcast, “Armchair Expert,” after she attracted attention for letting her 9-year-old ride the New York City subway by himself.

Although letting their daughters run around an amusement park for seven hours was a way for Shepard and Bell to enjoy some time to themselves, it also gave their kids an opportunity to practice navigating the world without their parents overseeing their every move.

Unsupervised kids might be a common sight in Copenhagen, but it has become a rare one here in the U.S., where kids spend most of their time in adult-directed activities.

Many parents raised in the 1970s and ’80s recall long afternoons