Kristen Bell Says It’s Hard Parenting During The Pandemic

Kristen Bell speaks out about how hard it was to balance work, online learning, and parenting during the pandemic and how they had to lean on therapy sessions to see them through.

Kristin Bell News – Talks About Protecting Her Mental Health Amidst The Chaos

During PEOPLE’s exclusive first look at Yahoo’s Reset Your Mindset: Pandemic Parenting live-stream special, which will air on Friday at 2 p.m. ET, the voice of Frozen’s quirky Princess Anna gets real about the importance of leaning on others for support. “’It takes a village’ is a cliché for a reason,” the mother of two says.

“Balancing work and parenting and online learning during the pandemic, and especially supporting mental health, it was really hard,” Bell said about lockdown parenting, adding that she and her husband Dax Shepard have found out that therapy is very useful.

“Therapy’s been big for us during the pandemic,” she shares. “We both rely on it, my husband and I, for personal growth and ultimately bring what we learn individually into the relationship.”

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She also adds that parents should be able to prioritize their attention on their children’s mental health, since not only adults need it, and she’s found it useful to “sort of dissect what’s happening in their brain and let them know it’s all okay.”

“We’re always honest with our kids, and sometimes it’s been really hard,” Bell continued. “We explained what COVID was and why it exists and we told them everything really early on and we just reminded them that we’re luckier than most people and we have to do what we can to help others during this time.”

Previously she opened up about how it’s great that she can ask for advice from her husband and lean on him for support during her stressful times, saying “He’s made me feel like I’m not doing it by myself, which has made me fall much deeper in love with him. Because I think I’d pull my hair out if I thought it was all up to me.”
Parenting and Giving Back to the Society

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The mother of two daughters, Lincoln, 8, and Delta, 6, knows that giving back is a great thing and has tried to do that through Hello Bello, a baby products company she shares with her husband.

“We wanted to start giving away a year’s worth of diapers every week to help parents who need it. We did that before the pandemic and we just doubled it and I think that’s the responsible thing to do. When you have a company, you need to be a good company.”

She advises other parents who struggle to raise their kids to try not to do it all alone. She says that it’s okay to lean on others, “being a parent is learning that sometimes you just got to throw away the rule book and you gotta be flexible.”

Another thing she’s confident about is finding “joy amidst the chaos,” because sometimes it’s pretty easy to overlook the beautiful moments you spend with your family when you’re experiencing a lot of stress every day.