Blake Shelton Says He Was ‘All About’ Helping Raise Gwen Stefani’s Boys
It's like Disneyland when they come to Oklahoma to visit," he says.
Blake Shelton has really found his stride at home lately, joking that life with his pop superstar wife Gwen Stefani and her three sons is full of family get togethers and big, communal meals.
“There’s a reason my chin looks like a stork. And I’m OK with it!” Shelton said with a laugh, speaking on Friday (February 25) during the 2022 Country Radio Seminar in Nashville.
Shelton was sitting for an hour-long, wide-ranging chat with Country Countdown USA host Lon Helton, and the pair shared lots of laughs like that over tons of subjects. But all joking aside, Shelton said being a role model to Stefani’s young boys — aged 15, 13 and 8 — is something he takes seriously.
To be honest, he says, he thinks Gwen figured the boys would scare him off when they started dating on NBC’s The Voice some five years ago. But because of his family history, he was “all in.”
“I think Gwen thought when we first started seeing each other it was just going to be a moment in time because of [the boys],” he explained. “[But] my dad, when he married my mom, she had a baby who wasn’t his — my brother Richie — and he took Richie on and raised him from the time he was one year old. My brother never thought of my dad as anything other than his dad — in fact, when my mom and dad divorced, Richie went to live with dad, not mom. And then later in life, my dad married this incredible woman named Terri. My dad had already raised me, my sister, my brother Richie, his kids were out of the house, and he married a lady who had a 9 year old and a 12 year old, and started all over again, got them raised and out of the house.
“The example my dad set for me was [whether or not she had kids] wasn’t even a consideration,” Shelton went on. “You got three boys? Awesome. My dad did it, my dad raised me, I can do this. Now, I didn’t know what I was signing up for, but I was all about signing up for it. And everyday I fall in love with the boys as much as I do with Gwen.”
Apparently, the only problem early on was that Stefani’s boys were born and raised in urban Southern California, and had no exposure to the country lifestyle. But Shelton says under his watch, they’ve come around.
“It’s like Disneyland when they come to Oklahoma to visit,” he gushed. “I remember the first time they came, one was too small but the other two were like ‘Well, what do we do now?’ I was like ‘Go out that door, and don’t come back ’til you’re too tired to go any further.’ They couldn’t imagine just going down to the creek with a net or turning over rocks, or getting on a buggy and driving around. And now it’s second nature.
“I’ve got ‘em fishing for sure,” he continued. “They’re not going to be entering the CMA archery competition anytime soon. But when it comes to burning things, starting fires or throwing hatchets, you better get out of the way.”
Check out more from Blake Shelton’s keynote CRS interview here, including why he thinks “the clock’s ticking” on his career, and how Stefani has made him more spiritual.
