Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty Images, Amazon, Everett Collection (Walt Disney Studios, 20th Century Studios, Columbia Pictures, Marvel, Searchlight, Netflix, Disney Channel)

Growing up as an only child with a single mom, W. Kamau Bell’s childhood was fairly serene compared to that of his three daughters. He spent his summers reading books, eating cereal, and watching a little TV. By contrast, he says, his daughters have become used to life in a noisy, busy house, where one parent or another is always trying to dash off to get some kid to some activity. There are more logistics to worry about now than there were when he was a child, Bell says, and with his daughters—who are 15, 11, and 8 — currently traversing different stages in their girlhood, it can seem like a lot.

Package that together with the fact that all three girls went through the COVID years, which Bell says made them part of the “feral generation of kids who didn’t have all the playdates that they should have,” and throw Bell’s career as a brainy, boundary-pushing comedian into the mix, and you get a pretty good sense of what life is like in his family’s home.

“All three of my girls seem a bit rough around the edges,” he says, “but I think that trait will only help their generation.” For America to thrive in the years to come, Bell asserts, “we’re gonna need some people who are rough around the edges.”

Here’s what Bell reads, watches, and listens to with his whole wild bunch.

My wife and I are very conscious of the fact that we’re raising mixed-race girls who are also Black, because that’s how it works. So we’d read the children’s books that every other kid reads, like those by Sandra Boynton and Llama Llama Red Pajama, but very early on, we also made sure to buy books like Colors of Us, by Karen Katz, which is about how people can have different skin tones.

I don’t want my kid to be the kid who doesn’t know about the thing that every kid is talking about, even if I don’t necessarily love it. Even if my kids don’t like superheroes, they should know Spider-Man exists. I want them to have a general cultural IQ, but I also want them to have the things that they need and that feed them, and so that’s why we always prioritized stories like Colors of Us over other general kids’ books.

Now, my friend Adam Mansbach and I have a children’s book coming out in October, which is our first one. It stars my family and it’s called Rock Paper Scissors Cheese.

Adam is most famously known for the book Go the Fuck to Sleep, but he’s also got three girls. We hang out together pretty regularly, and we were like, “We should write a kids’ book.” I knew that people might expect me to write a book about why kids shouldn’t be racist, but those aren’t the books in my house that my kids want to read. They want to read the kids’ books that are fun. But because this book stars my family, you get to see lots of different shades of skin and it’s about all the things I’ve been talking about, like a family who is bored and trying to figure out what to do, so they get into a wild game.

There are so many different ways to accomplish representation and to accomplish making things better, and some of those ways are just by talking about how people exist. One of the things that has been really fun with the book, and that was really important to me, was how, like even if my mom and I both look brown from a distance, if you put our hands together, you can see there are different shades of brown. So all of us in the book have different shades of skin, which is how a mixed-race family works.

Sometimes I try to take my kids on business trips with me if they’re just a day or two long. I love doing it because it gives me time to hang out with them one-on-one, so we can just be with each other as opposed to being spokes in a larger wheel.

Three years ago, I went on a trip like that with my middle child, who I feel like I understand in a very particular way. Middle kids always feel like they’re being pushed around. As an only child, I felt like I always had a lot of free time, so I understand why she feels like she’s not getting what she needs. It’s like she’s always on her way to somebody else’s event and she needs her own time.

Also, I feel like taking kids to airports at that age is great because it teaches them that the world will not always be waiting for them. When kids are in their houses, the parents wait on them before they leave. But if you’re in an airport and you have a connecting flight, you’ve just got to go. It’s like, Look, we have to get from gate AAA to gate ZZZZ, and our flight is not waiting for us. You cannot go to the bathroom, you cannot buy anything, you cannot want to eat. We’ve just got to go, and when that happens, it’s like you can see kids’ operating systems get updated in real time. Like, once they can figure that out, they start to understand oh, you mean the world’s not always on my schedule?

So, anyway, I had a college gig at Colorado State University, and because they knew she was coming with me, they put together a swag bag for her that they gave her when we showed up at the gig. It had a sweatshirt and a pennant and a stuffed animal of the school mascot, and for like a year after that, she was absolutely determined to go there when she was old enough.

We had a day in Fort Collins before the gig, too, so we were like, We’re going to try all the ice-cream shops in town! There’s a kids’ museum here? We’re going to have to go there. An arcade, too? It’s a great way for me to be on the road, really, because sometimes it’s boring and lonely. I would never go to an art museum or a kids’ museum or an arcade by myself, but when I take a kid with me, I go out in town.

Photo: Lester Cohen/Getty Images

Because I have three kids, they have to take turns picking what they want to listen to when we’re in the car. My wife wants turns, too, so she gets them. I never really want turns, because I just want everyone else to be happy.

All of them have very different musical tastes, too, so sometimes we go song by song. My 15-year-old will want Daniel Caesar; my 11-year-old will want Lauren Spencer Smith; and my 8-year-old will want some ridiculous kid song. Well, actually, it’s either the most annoying kid song or something by John Legend. We sort of rotate between those two poles.

Generally, she’ll pick “Ordinary People” if she picks John Legend. I think there’s just something specifically about that song that grabbed her, and it’s been her song for the past couple of years.

It’s funny to think about, really. What songs do your kids like? “Well, they like this song about a banana and they like John Legend.”

Photo: Walt Disney Studios/Everett Collection

On Father’s Day, our big activity for the day was that the whole family went to see Toy Story 5. It’s funny when you have a movie that we are all excited about seeing, but it doesn’t happen that often.

Toy Story has been around long enough that there are parents who have grown up with it. I was an adult when the first one came out, but I still see it as my franchise, and also my 8-year-old sees it as her franchise. So we all saw Toy Story 5, which was great because none of us felt like we were being dragged into it.

In terms of a review, I think we were all happy to see Jessie take front and center.

When my oldest daughter was 6 or 7, we watched Toy Story 2, which is the first one that Jessie is in. After that, she would sit around and sing Jessie’s song, “When She Loved Me,” which is a pretty melancholy song for a 6-year-old to sing. And now my 11-year-old, since seeing the new movie, has gone online and found fan theories about who Jessie’s owner was and how she’s supposedly related to the Inside Out franchise, so it has all taken on a life of its own.

Photo: Walt Disney Co./Everett Collection

When my oldest kid was born, I think streaming had started, but it wasn’t like you could get every movie yet. I think the only movie that Netflix had at the time that we felt like she would be interested in was The Aristocats, which is a Disney movie that’s not really great all the way through, like it’s pretty racist against Asians even if the songs are good.

I remember when Disney+ came out six or seven years ago. I was on the road and my wife reached out and was like, “Sign us up for Disney+. We need Disney+,” and now that has become the hub of so many of their experiences.

Photo: 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection

When we do a movie night, if my youngest is watching, we definitely need to pick something animated. She hasn’t segued into live-action movies yet.

My 15-year-old will still watch the new Trolls movies because she has very fond memories of the first Trolls movie. Kids will sit through movies even if they’re not fully into them just because they reference something else that’s familiar.

Sometimes, also, there will be a thing where if the movie isn’t hitting, like if the movie’s too young, then in the corner my 15-year-old will just get on her phone. If the movie’s too old, we’ll give my 8-year-old the iPad.

Photo: JoJo Whilden/Columbia Pictures/Marvel/Everett Collection

Historically, none of my kids were very interested in superhero things. I tried to pass that down, but it didn’t happen, so when a new superhero movie would come out, my wife and I would go by ourselves or I’d go by myself.

But at some point, my oldest kid realized that Zendaya is in the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, and that’s when she was like, “Well, now I have to see all these Spider-Man movies if they’re Zendaya movies.” So we’ve had fun watching the trilogy of Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, even if they’re all tied into a million other Marvel movies, so every three seconds we have to pause and I have to explain, like, “Okay, so that’s Iron Man and here’s his background” or “That’s Captain America and the thing he’s referring to is what happened with Thanos, and what happened there was …” It was a very frustrating and hilarious way to watch them, really.

Now there’s a lot of excitement among my 15-year-old and myself about the new Spider-Man movie, but we’re also trying to get my 11-year-old into it just because it’s fun when you have more people involved.

Something that’s good about Spider-Man is that my kids have never really been fans of violence, and Spider-Man doesn’t really fight like that. It’s not really hardcore fighting. If it’s too much, look away for a few minutes and you’ll be fine.

Photo: Searchlight Pictures/Everett Collection

My 11-year-old has become my documentary-watching buddy, like we watched Summer of Soul together. The first documentary that really hooked her was Black Barbie on Netflix. I realized that she was watching it even when I wasn’t around because she wanted to finish it without me. So now we have a rule about how you’re not supposed to watch a documentary unless your documentary partner is there with you.

I was in a documentary called Hollywood Black, about the history of Hollywood, so we sat down and watched that together, too. She’s doing an Alvin Ailey dance camp this summer, and a friend of mine directed a documentary about Alvin Ailey, so we’ve watched about half of that together as a way to prepare her for camp.

Watching these movies with her reminds me of how my mom and I would watch Eyes on the Prize or Roots or PBS documentaries together. The difference was that my mom could suggest things easier because there weren’t other choices on TV, so watching Eyes on the Prize was in part because there was nothing else happening on TV, whereas with my kids, sometimes they’re like, “Can we just put on something else?” I’m just glad my 11-year-old has developed the patience to watch documentaries with me, though.

Photo: Disney Channel/Everett Collection

My oldest daughter was 2 or 3 years old when the TV show Doc McStuffins hit, so there was a period of time in my house when Doc McStuffins was like religion. So much so, in fact — and I did this joke in my first Netflix special — that the first time she went to a doctor, she thought it was weird that the doctor wasn’t a Black woman because she’d watched so much Doc McStuffins, so mission accomplished.

My kids had a gardening teacher who left during COVID to start a podcast called The Marvel of My Ordinary Life!, which is about kids being rambunctious and adventurous. I don’t know how many listeners it has, but it’s a great podcast for kids, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.

I was walking around the streets of Berkeley years ago when my oldest was just a kid, and someone gave me this book that Lashon Daley had just written called Mr. Okra Sells Fresh Fruits and Vegetables. It’s a real story about a Black man in New Orleans who has a truck and drives around the city selling fresh fruits and vegetables. The book also sort of serves as a tourism guide to New Orleans, like the blueberries are as blue as the doors of the children’s museum, and the whatever else is green as the palm fronds at some other place.

Anyway, we had that book for years, and this is a book that, if you try to order it, it’s always back-ordered because they didn’t print a lot of them. But my middle kid, when she was about 4 or 5 years old, loved that book so much that she said, “I want to go to New Orleans and do all the things that are in this book.”

My dad lives in Alabama, so New Orleans is really only about two hours away, so one time when we took a trip to Alabama, we drove down to New Orleans and did all the things that Mr. Okra does in the book, which, for a 4-year-old, turned out to be such a powerful experience.

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