Honey, Kristen Bell shrunk the children—and Dax Shephard, too!
OK, not really, but the mother of two did have some fun with depth perception in the first photo of her daughter posted to Instagram Thursday! Dax and a little one (it's too far away to tell whether it's 3-year-old Lincoln or 20-month-old Delta) enjoyed their "First daddy daughter swim in Lake Michigan-a right of passage for any Mitten baby." Mama Kristen, a Michigan native like her hubby, framed the shot so that Dax and her daughter looked like they were right in the palm of her hand.
It's a cute family snapshot, for sure, and it's the kind Kristen and Dax want their fans to see as opposed to an intrusive photo taken by paparazzi. Back in 2014, the couple led the way for many media outlets (including E! News) to adopt a No Kids Policy. This granted a new level of privacy for the kids of celebrities, allowing parents to decide what the public could see, not a paparazzo. With less outlets publishing pictures of minors without consent, the demand for these images decreased, and the paparazzi largely stopped taking them. This let celeb kids be kids—not assumed public figures because of their parents' career choices.
While many celeb parents proudly post smiley photos of their kids to social media, Kristen and Dax want to keep their girls' identities out of the press. As Dax explained in a Huffington Post op-ed (written before the birth of baby Delta), "I personally believe, and I understand a lot of people differ on this point, that protecting her includes keeping her life private until the moment she decides otherwise. I think she is entitled to that. I think every minor is entitled to that."
He went on to explain that while and and Kristen "made a decision to get into show business and become public figures," their daughter did not. As Kristen later told Huffington Post, "No parent should feel like their child is being taken advantage of because of the choices they made on their career paths. The basis of the issue is keeping strangers away from children, whether they have cameras or not."
Luckily for Liberty and Delta, their clever mom Kristen has figured out a way to share a taste of the Shepard family fun while still keeping the girls out of the spotlight.