Dax Shepard Asked His Kids Not to Tell Friends Their Mom Is in ‘Frozen’ for a Very Good Reason
The protective dad is just looking out for his daughters.
It’s an issue many parents will never have to grapple with, but in Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard’s household, it’s an issue that they felt they needed to hammer home when their daughters got involved in a local community theater group. The theater was putting on a rendition of Frozen, and Shepard made sure to sit his daughters down and tell them to stay mum about their mother actually being Princess Anna from the Frozen franchise.
“I had to tell my daughters, I’m like, you cannot tell anyone in this thing that your mom is Princess Anna,” Shepard said in conversation with Justin Timberlake during a recent episode of the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard podcast. “I know you’re proud, and you should be able to say that, but I’m just warning you that will probably make other kids jealous and they won’t know how to handle that feeling.”
Bell, who voiced Princess Anna in both of the Disney Frozen films, and Shepard, have kept their kids offline and are raising them out of the public eye. And part of their parenting process is to raise their daughters as though they don’t have famous parents (one of whom voiced the most popular Disney character since the days of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty).
I have a great fear that kids are gonna hang out with them solely because of that, or resent them because of that, Shepard continued. To me, the two options both seem terrible. Either they’re gonna have fake friends or they’re gonna have people hate them for no reason.
Timberlake, who lent his voice to the Trolls franchise, has encountered this same unique parenting hurdle. “We have the same thing where the kids at school with my 5-year-old are like, ‘Your dad is Branch from Trolls,'” he told Shepard. “I guess for guys like us, the hope is that we just keep instilling in them that we’ve got really fun jobs but it’s not who we are. And hopefully, down the road that has more weight to it.”
Both Shepard and Timberlake agreed that their parenting techniques revolve around making sure [their kids] can be kids for as long as possible and not have the way of somebody else treating them differently because of something that their parents do, as Timberlake said.
And if that means instructing your kids to keep the secret that your mom played Princess Anna during their community theater rendition of Frozen, then you gotta do what you gotta do to help them form meaningful friendships.
