Kristen Bell and Dax Shepherd let their kids run around alone at a Danish theme park

Kristen Bell and Dax Shepherd may have found the key to actually being able to relax while on a family vacation. All they had to do was let their kids loose in a theme park in Denmark—and if that sounds a little scary, just wait until you hear Bell explain the situation.

“Don’t you find that going on vacation as a parent, it’s not a vacation—you’re just watching your kids in a different city,” Bell said during a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live. “They have none of their creature comforts, they’re asking you 1,000 more questions than they normally do. Oh, god.”

Yep, that is one of the biggest issues with family vacations. All too often, they are not a vacation for parents—or, at least, for whichever parent tends to carry the majority of the mental load in the household.

But Bell and Shepherd figured out how to solve this when they took their two daughters, 11-year-old Lincoln and 9-year-old Delta, on a European vacation to Denmark, Iceland, and Norway.

“The hack is, when we went to Copenhagen, we stayed at this hotel that was right at Tivoli Gardens, which is a 7-acre theme park, which apparently, is maybe where Walt Disney got the idea for Disneyland,” Bell explained to Kimmel. “Anyway, the hotel opens up into the theme park and so we just were kind of like, ‘Are we going to like, free-range parenting and roll the die here?”

Bell added that her daughters were all about that sense of independence they had while the family stayed there.

“They woke up at 6:00 every morning. They scanned their bracelets to go outside. Didn’t see them for seven hours. Just running around Copenhagen,” she joked.

“And that was OK?” Kimmel asked.

Bell answered, “Apparently. They’re both alive. We all returned home.”

As for her and Shepherd, she said the freedom was fun for their daughters, but “heaven” for them as parents.

“We just had coffee, we played Spades, and then around 3:00, we’d be like, ‘Anybody see them?'” she said. “And then one of them would run up and need a Band-Aid or whatever. It was very cool.”

That kind of parenting may not be for everyone, but when I was around Delta’s age, my family took a trip to Mexico, where we stayed at a resort where, every day, the entire family would split up in the morning and go our separate ways. My younger siblings got dropped off at the on-site childcare center. My mom hit the beach and my dad went to the golf course. I made a friend from Canada and she and I played beach volleyball, went snorkeling, drank virgin strawberry daiquiris, and rode the water slide. My older brothers? No idea what they were doing, but I’m sure they had fun, too. 

The point is, in a contained environment like that, there’s a lot to be said for giving kids their freedom and letting them have their own fun. We all had the vacation we wanted that year, and it was great. Sounds like the Bell-Shepherd family did the same, and more power to them.