Time flies when you’re parenting! Us Weekly caught up with Kristen Bell at the Pandas premiere in Hollywood on Saturday, March 17, where she dished on motherhood and learning to embrace her kids getting older.
“It is [bittersweet],” the 37-year-old Bad Moms actress told Us of her daughters, Lincoln, 4, and Delta, 3, growing out of the toddler stage.
“I was really hoping when I had kids, I got the two that wouldn’t grow up. But I didn’t,” she joked of her girls, who she shares with husband Dax Shepard. “You can either look at it like you’re losing something, like she’s never going to be a baby again, or you can change your glasses and look at it positively.”
She added: “Like I now get to know this human being. I’m allowed to get to know this person who will have her own opinions and ideas. That’s something I’m really looking forward to.”
And Bell seems to have a good hold on motherhood. The Frozen star opened up to Us Weekly in February about empowering her children through fairy tales.
“I see a lot of books my daughters are given, and it’s all about the prince wanting to marry the princess and all he does is kiss her and she says ‘Yes!’” she noted, adding that when she’s finished reading to them she begins the learning process.
“I say, ‘I wonder why he didn’t get to know her? I wonder why he didn’t ask her whether she wanted to marry him?’” she told Us. “It’s a really tiny change, but I’m definitely working toward empowering them.”
Bell and Shepard — who wed in October 2013 — also send their girls to a preschool “that prides itself in emotional learning.”
“When the kids get physical with each other — which they do because they’re all feral at this point — they teach them to say things like, ‘I don’t like it when you touch my body like that.’ They say that to me: ‘I don’t like having my hair touched.’”
Pandas opens in select IMAX theaters starting April 6.
Reporting by Nicholas White.
