Actors Launch Campaign To Keep Celebrities' Kids Out Of Photos

Published March 31, 2014 at 12:50 PM CDT

Actor Dax Shepard and actress Kristen Bell arrive at the 70th Annual Golden Globe Awards on January 13, 2013 in Beverly Hills, California. They have launched a social media campaign to keep celebrities' children out of photographs unless the parents give consent. (Jason Merritt/Getty Images)

You know that section in tabloids that shows celebrities running errands with their kids, or at their child’s soccer game?

Maybe you don’t look at those pictures, and our next guests would thank you for that.

Actors Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard have launched a new social media campaign to get the kids of very visible celebrities out of pictures.

Using the Twitter hashtag “no kids policy,” the husband and wife duo have asked their followers to boycott media organizations that publish photographs of celebrities’ children without parental consent.

And the message has spread, with major media organizations pledging not to run pictures of celebrities’ children, including People, Access Hollywood, Inside Edition, NBC’s Today Show, and US Weekly.

Bell and Shepard join Here & Now’s Robin Young to discuss the campaign.

Bell says she understand the appeal of seeing celebrity parents and their kids, but the process of getting that photograph is “extremely disturbing.”

“I thought it was cute as well, until I witnessed firsthand the 15 strange men who hang out at playgrounds and disrupt the sort of natural flow of children’s traffic there, and end up pushing kids and yelling,” Bell said.

On a recent trip, Bell recalls coming back to L.A. and being confronted by paparazzi after stepping off the plane.

“You can’t see because they are so many flash bulbs, and mind you, there is nothing newsworthy about what we are doing,” Bell said. “But the consumption of celebrities is so rabid. And we’re here to just talk about the fact that maybe it’s a little unethical to be consuming the children in that fashion.”

“We don’t feel like our child is a public personality that could be considered newsworthy,” Shepard agrees. “We do believe in this country you are private until you choose otherwise, and that should be a right that we all should fight to keep.”

Guests

Kristen Bell, an actress appearing on the T.V. series House of Lies and Veronica Mars. She tweets @IMKristenBell.
Dax Shepard, an actor appearing on the T.V. series Parenthood. He tweets @daxshepard1.