Kristen Bell is not apologizing for allowing her daughters to drink beer — nonalcoholic beer, that is.
“My kids have ordered nonalcoholic beers at restaurants … which sounds insane,” Bell told Kelly Clarkson on “The Kelly Clarkson Show” Monday.
Bell and husband Dax Shepard “would walk the babies at night in our neighborhood when my daughter was really little,” Bell said. “He is a recovering addict, but he likes nonalcoholic beer.”
Bell and Shepard, who married in 2013, share two children: Lincoln, 9, and Delta, 8.
While they strolled, Shepard would carry their daughter on his chest and bring along an NA beer. As a baby, Bell said, her daughter would suck on the rim of the glass or can her husband was drinking from. “I think it feels to her like something special, something daddy.”
“We’ve been at restaurants where (my daughter) said, ‘Do you have anything? Do you have any nonalcoholic beer?'” Bell said.
Though Bell’s initial reaction was that the behavior should stay at home, she added that she has another reaction, too: “You can judge me if you want, I’m not doing anything wrong.”
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Shepard and Bell have been open about Shepard’s struggles with substance abuse.
“Everybody’s up against their own demon,” Bell said in 2020 on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.” “Sometimes it’s anxiety and depression, sometimes it’s substance abuse. The thing I love most about Dax is … that he was able to tell me and tell us and say, ‘We need a different plan.'”
Shepard shared on an episode of his “Armchair Expert” podcast around the same time in a no-holds-barred conversation that he had recently relapsed and wanted to be honest about his journey.
Shepard, who previously struggled with alcohol addiction and other drugs, said in the episode he had previously taken prescription pain pills due to injuries from riding his motorcycle. But “for the last eight weeks maybe” he’d been “on them all day.”
Shepard asked Bell and podcast producer Monica Padman for help at the time, getting audibly emotional at times during the podcast discussion with Padman about getting the situation under control on his own.
“One of the main reasons I love him is that he’s also addicted to growth,” Bell said at the time. “He’s addicted to evolving. He was like ‘I don’t want to risk this family and kids, so let’s put new things in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’ … I just love that he’s addicted to growth and I will continue to stand by him because he’s very, very worth it.”
Contributing: Hannah Yasharoff, Rasha Ali
