Kristen Bell Tells Lester Holt How She's Talking To Her Kids About Race
The pair discussed sports, movies, and her life in quarantine
Actress and mom-of-two Kristen Bell joined Lester Holt for the latest Nightly News: Kids Edition, and talked to the handsome host about what it’s been like quarantining with her family and also how she’s been discussing the Black Lives Matter movement and racism with her kids.
Bell opened up about what she’s been up to during the pandemic and was her usual hilarious and truthful self. “Getting to know my family, and you know, that my kid doesn’t like apples anymore, that my husband changed his opinion on this,” she said. “It’s been really eye-opening to spend this amount of time with my immediate family.”
Bell also joked about her mad soccer skills. “I’m always hesitant to play because I think I’m gonna trip and fall, which I usually do, but man it’s way more fun than you remember playing soccer with your family,” she said. “I always reiterate to my kids that I don’t stay active to have a certain body, I stay active to have a healthy mind. And in our family, we have a goal that everyone has to do something for their brain and something for their body each day, no matter what it is.”
Bell has been open about her time in quarantine, homeschooling her kids, and the toll it’s taken on them mentally. But for all the frustration, she said there have definitely been some positives. “It sounds simple but it’s true – getting to know my family again,” she told Holt. “I think that we can all suffer from confirmation bias where you, you sort of think you know what someone’s gonna say or how they feel about something, but everyone has experiences every single day that change them.”
She also opened up about how she’s discussing racism in America amid all the protests that have been happening around the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death. “We have had quite a few discussions in our household about what’s happening, about what they see on TV, about what they see in the streets,” she said.
Her kids are five and seven and she said she was worried they may not yet be able to grasp the seriousness of all that is happening. “I have been doing things like, there are a ton of better books than ours right now to be explaining these particular issues. We’ve ordered books for our children, and we’ve also shown them some pictures of the protest in comparison to show how different types of people are treated and we’ve asked them to tell us their thoughts.”
She also talked about their favorite quarantine movies because we all know a good movie once in a while (or twice a day) can get us through anything. “We just watched Big, which is incredible and really holds up and last night we actually watched Mrs. Doubtfire, which is also pretty great,” she said. “Recently we’ve been into Wonder – it’s a more recent movie, but we read the book with my kids and we loved it.”
