Sex ed is in session! Even celebrity parents have to have the awkward birds and the bees discussion with their children — and many have gotten candid about how it went.
In September 2018, Kristen Bell exclusively told Us Weekly about how she and Dax Shepard planned on being transparent with their daughters, Lincoln and Delta.
“We decided when we had kids to be very, very honest with them and never to sort of spin a fairytale, even if it’s about hard subjects,” Bell explained at the time. However, when it came to the chat about where babies come from, the conversation did not go as the couple had originally planned.
“We said, ‘Well, mom has a vagina, and dad has a penis and there’s sperm, and an ovum and then they connect and it makes a baby,” she recounted. “Truly, by the second sentence, they had walked outside.”
Alyssa Milano, for her part, could not wait to have the discussion with her children, Milo and Elizabella, whom she shares with husband David Bugliari. “I love it all. I’m ready,” she dished to Us in August 2018. “I’m ready! I would do it now if they asked.”
Another star who hasn’t shied away from the topic is Gwyneth Paltrow. In an interview with Entertainment Tonight in October 2021, the Goop founder — who shares daughter Apple and son Moses with ex-husband Chris Martin — encouraged parents to be truthful when broaching the subject with their kids.
“I will always just encourage my children to really listen to themselves, listen to their instincts, listen to if something feels right and to act from that place,” the Iron Man star said at the time. “I try always to be neutral on the topic. I think my generation, we got a lot of messages around sex that made us feel bad about it. I try to just be curious. And teenagers are never going to want to talk to their parents about sex ever, so I sort of follow their lead. Luckily, in middle school they had a very thorough sex education, so the school handled the birds and the bees parts, and then I am there for any questions. But the questions are pretty minimal.”
While appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in October 2021, Paltrow recounted an interaction she had when her son Moses initially found out that her company sells vibrators. While her son was “embarrassed” at first, he ultimately came around. “A few months ago, he said … ‘I realized, no, this is great. You’re making people feel not embarrassed to buy something, and that’s great. You’re a feminist,’” the actress recalled to the host.
Keep scrolling for more celebrity parents’ confessions about having the sex talk with their children:
