Kristen Bell explains how she talks about sex with her daughters, 9 and 7
Kristen Bell has a game plan for how she speaks to her daughters Lincoln, 9, and Delta, 7, about sex.
The Veronica Mars star, 41, appeared on the first episode of Rachel Bilson and Olivia Allen's podcast Broad Ideas to chat about parenting. The conversation turned to how Bell tries to be as open as appropriate with her two children, who she shares with husband Dax Shepard.
Joking that her kids tend to get bored with the topic any time she mentions more scientific words like "sperm" or "ovum," she explained, "It's really important to give them a little bit more context about how it's relative. 'Daddy and I do this because we have those feelings towards each other. There are feelings we each get in our private parts for each other. We also get in our brains and in our bellies.'"
Since Lincoln and Delta haven't yet experienced that kind of attraction yet, Bell explained that she tries to relate to things they do understand.
"[I ask,] 'Remember how you weren't interested in swimming, and then you got interested in swimming? You'll hit a point where you're starting to have those feelings,'" she recalled. "It's going to feel butterflies are in your stomach and it's going to feel like your crotch is on fire and it's going to feel like a whole bunch of things like that.' And they're like, ‘Really?'"
She also shared a tip for talking about sex that she heard from actress Michelle Monaghan.
"When you're having the sex talk, the one thing to make it even more sex-positive is when you say, 'And then the man put his penis in the woman's vagina,' you say, 'And then, the woman takes the man's penis and puts it in her vagina,'" she shared. "And all of a sudden you completely change the power dynamic for the woman hearing that story."
This is not the first time Bell has spoken about having the sex talk with her kids. In a 2018 episode of WTF With Marc Maron, she shared that her daughters sometimes get bored while talking about sex.
"They've asked about sex before and Dax says, 'Well, there's a penis, there's a vagina and there's an ovum and there's ejaculate,'" Bell explained to Maron. "And they're like, 'Can I have some juice?!' They're just off of it. They don't care."
"Sex is wonderful," Bell said. "I want my kids to have sex. I want them to have good, healthy, positive, happy, wild sex."
In a March 2020 interview with the Motherly Podcast, she stressed that it's important for her kids to know "how the penis works and how the vagina works."
"I just don't understand the American shame in that," she said. "In fact, I think it equips them to understand pregnancy way better. The agency they have over their bodies to say, 'Oh yeah, this is how it works ... Daddy has a penis, mommy has a vagina. Here's how it works. And here's the part of daddy's DNA and the part of mommy's DNA that grows you like a seed.'"
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