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 roaming around and playing with the other neighborhood kids. In a time before cellphones, kids knew it was time to head home for dinner when the streetlights came on.

But amid the intensive media coverage of kidnapping cases, such as the disappearances of Etan Patz in 1979 and Johnny Gosch in 1982, plus the black-and-white photos of missing children on the back of every milk carton, the collective belief that an unsupervised child is a child in danger began to take hold — and it has had lasting consequences on generations of children and their parents.

The reality is that child abduction is rare, and in most cases the child is abducted by a parent during a custody dispute. In 2023, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received reports of 28,886 missing children and youth. But these numbers included young adults, ages 18 to 20, and 93% of the cases involved runaways. The majority of cases were resolved, meaning the child or young person was located. Only 120 cases involved non-family abductions, and only one case among those remains unresolved.

There is no epidemic of child abduction, and, when it does occur, the suspects are rarely strange men driving vans.

Yet parents remain fearful. The world feels scary, so we figure it’s best to act on our fears.

“While it is true that the world has much violence, it is not true that there is an immediate threat all the time in our lives,” Tovah Klein, author of Raising Resilience: How to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty, told HuffPost. “But seeing so much bad news can make us feel incredibly unsafe and vulnerable. And then we put that onto our children, worry that they are unsafe, too, and try to protect them.”

But it turns out that by preventing one (unlikely) scenario, we’ve ended up exposing our children to another set of risks.

The epidemic that we’re seeing among young people these days involves not crime but mental health. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that in 2023, 40% of high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness — to the extent that almost every day, for at least two weeks in a row, they stopped doing their usual activities. These numbers have been rising over the past decade, with the exception of a slight decrease from 2021 to 2023, which could be explained by the return to school and other activities post-pandemic.

Nevertheless, the numbers remain alarmingly high, and they were rising steadily even before the disruption caused by COVID-19. What could be causing such widespread mental health issues?

In his book “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt makes a compelling case that the loss of free play and independence, coupled with the introduction of smartphones, have “rewired” childhood in a way that leaves kids vulnerable to anxiety and depression.

Though some critics have argued that the data doesn’t paint such a clear picture, and although many parents have balked at his recommendations regarding technology (no phones before age 14, no social media until 16), Haidt noted during an appearance on Emily Oster’s “Parent Data” podcast that his recommendation to give kids more opportunities for free play and independence is one that has received no pushback.

Skenazy, who in 2017 founded an organization (alongside Jonathan Haidt and others) called Let Grow, told HuffPost that today’s kids are very accustomed to an external locus of control. All day long, someone — a teacher, a parent, a coach — is telling them what to do. Not all of this is bad, but when it’s the only thing kids know, it can cause anxiety and passivity, Skenazy explained.

“You have no freedom, and you’re pretty passive because you’re just awaiting marching orders all the time.”

In order to build up their confidence, kids need to have experiences where the locus of control is an internal one, inside of them. Unfortunately, we’ve taken many of these opportunities away in the name of their safety.

It doesn’t have to be like this, even in schools where an educator is always present. Klein noticed when visiting schools in China that “the teachers stood far back, watching, but giving children a lot of space to explore and interact, with the message that they trusted the children to play as they wanted, to figure out how to work things out amongst themselves.”

The children took more risks, both with their peers and in their physical environment: jumping, climbing and hanging on zip lines, Klein said.

“All of this showed their confidence that they had built up to over time, and that confidence feeds into a feeling that ‘I can do it,’ a core of independence.”

It is a skill that children build gradually, starting at a young age, she explained. “Children learn to do more themselves when they are given opportunities to ― from getting dressed, to making the bed, to being the helper at school, to walking to school with friends.”

Though we don’t have proof that a lack of these kinds of opportunities leads directly to any specific mental health problem, we all understand that this core of independence and confidence in themselves is an integral part of kids’ well-being.

When parents rush in to solve kids’ problems for them, or to prevent them from running into issues at all, they take away important opportunities. “In order to gain confidence in being able to handle hard moments, children need to live it, face the obstacle and feel the strength of getting through it,” Klein said.

“They can do this with a parent on the sidelines giving a message of assurance that they believe the child can handle it.”

Parents understand that kids need opportunities to practice independence, although it seems that most of us have a hard time following through and providing these for children. A 2023 Mott Poll from the C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital at the University of Michigan found that 74% of parents of kids ages 5 to 11 made a point of having their children do things by themselves when possible, and 84% of parents of kids ages 9 to 11 agreed that children benefit from spending free time without adult supervision. Yet when asked about common scenarios in which parents might let kids go unsupervised, few parents reported doing so. Only 33% said they allowed kids ages 9 to 11 to walk or bike to a friend’s house, and just 15% let kids of these ages trick-or-treat with friends.

Though they may not show it with their actions, “a lot of people believe in the idea that kids need more independence,” Skenazy said.

Yet when Kristen Bell describes letting her kids have free rein in an amusement park, we read it as an “admission” of some kind ― as though the parent has done something truly risky, even though the actual risk is incredibly small.

“It’s sort of a collective problem,” Skenazy said. “So many people want to let their kids play outside after school, walk to school, run errands ― but we don’t realize that everybody else does.”

She added, “It’s really great when a celebrity says, ‘I’m doing it,’ because then it can be a lighthouse.”

When parents hold the reins at all times, it isn’t just children who are negatively affected. In addition to passing up opportunities for a break or a few minutes of conversation with another adult, parents miss out on knowing that their kids are capable, that they can rise to the occasion even when we aren’t in the room with them. The real tests, after all, happen when we’re not there, whether it’s working through homesickness that first night at sleep-away camp or finding the courage to say no when another kid makes a dangerous suggestion.

“The only thing that rewires parents is having an experience of finding out that their kid is competent, capable, sometimes even kind, without them there,” Skenazy said.

After kids accomplish one challenge, they’re ready for another ― and their parents are, too. “The next month, they do something else new, and then the next month they do something else new. And pretty soon, you’ve renormalized,” Skenazy explained. “You’ve renormalized the idea of kids doing something independent, because they go do it. But you’ve also recalibrated the parent’s heart and conscience.”

Before parents have the evidence that independent activity is both safe and beneficial for their kids, they’re all thinking the same thing: “I can’t let them go. If I did, I would kill myself if anything bad ever happened,” Skenazy said.

“They go to the worst place first and proceed as if it’s likely,” she explained. But after seeing their child’s success, parents are forced to abandon this line of thought. “When you see your kid blossoming, it just doesn’t compute.”

As a co-founder of Let Grow, which promotes childhood independence through school programs, advocacy and research, Skenazy thinks that “a collective problem requires a collective solution, which means a lot of people doing the same thing at once.” She pointed out that Haidt’s book makes the same argument.

Two components of the Let Grow formula are an assignment and a play club. Both are deceptively simple and are available free on the organization’s website. The Let Grow assignment asks kids (at a teacher’s behest) to “go home and do something new on your own, with your parents’ permission, but without your parents,” Skenazy said. Suggested activities vary widely by age but include going to the store, making a sandwich, climbing a tree and walking the dog.

If it’s given as an assignment and all the other kids are doing it, then instead of worrying that they may be criticized or judged for letting their children walk to the store alone, parents can instead connect by asking, “So, what did your kid do?”

It’s that first letting go that is game-changing for parents, Skenazy said.

“The only thing that I’ve seen that really rewires parents and allows them to start being Dax-and-Kristen-like is doing it. You have to actually let go at least once, and when they come back and they’re excited — or they screwed up and they forgot to get the change but it’s OK and everybody has a laugh — that rewires the parent.”

The play club idea also requires community buy-in, although not much in the way of funding. It’s simply giving kids an opportunity for more free play, a sort of bonus recess before or after school. The vision is that a school will donate a space for kids’ free play ― supervised but unstructured ― on an ongoing basis. The supervision can come from one paid caregiver or a revolving community of volunteers, but the idea is to get kids together, off their screens, coming up with their own games, projects and imaginary worlds, using a variety of basic tools, like foam blocks or empty cardboard boxes. New York City’s play streets program is one long-running, large-scale example.

The interactions that kids experience in free play, Skenazy said, “build you into a competent, resourceful person with friends who knows how to make things happen and has that internal locus of control, and is far less anxious.”