Kristen Bell doesn’t have all the answers (and neither does her husband)

Kristen Bell is one of our favorite celebrity moms because she’s never pretended to have all the answers, and apparently, neither does her husband, Dax Shepard.

The couple share two daughters, 5-year-old Lincoln and 3-year-old Delta, and Bell tells Entertainment Tonight the girls are a lot like their dad in that they are on a search for answers. They just have to get used to the fact that mom and dad don’t always have them.

“They ask a ton of questions, and not annoying questions but questions that are leading them to a sort of greater truth,”says Bell. “Like this afternoon my husband was listening to a podcast about Watergate about how the Nixon presidency fell and my 5-year-old was like, ‘Why did that woman want to call the newspaper?’ And he was trying to answer and he’s like, ‘I can’t unravel why the Nixon presidency tumbled,’ and (Lincoln) was like, ‘Well, try.'”

Anyone with a curious kid in their life can relate. One question leads to another and another and before you know it you’re basically giving the verbal equivalent of a watered down, Cliffs Notes version of U.S. history.

Bell and Shepard may not have all the answers, but they do know how to get answers from their kids. Like so many parents, the couple have had some trouble getting more than one world from their kids when they ask “How was your day?” so they tried a new approach.

“Everything I ask my children to do in life, I explain to them why,” Bell recently told PopSugar.

“Kids don’t naturally want to tell you about their day because they want to live in the moment—they don’t want to live in the past,” she explained, adding that she and Shepard sat the girls down to help them understand why it’s important for them to answer the question.

“[We asked them] ‘Do you know why we ask you about your day? I ask you about your day and I ask Daddy about his day because we’ve been separated for a few hours and I wonder how you’re feeling . . . if you experienced something today you want to talk about. Also because I’m interested and it gives us a chance to reconnect to each other.'”

She explained to the girls that this is “why people ask one another about their day. It also makes the other person that’s being asked feel very good and valued. It’s a nice way to show you love someone.”

That’s a pretty awesome explanation of why mom and dad need an answer, and Bell says she and Shepard will try to explain Watergate again—when Lincoln is a little older.

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