Blake Shelton opens up about parenting style with Gwen Stefani

Blake Shelton has speaken about his experience of being a stepfather.

The country music singer appeared on the Today show to promote his new restaurant opening soon in Las Vegas. The interview also featured The Voice alum’s take on parenting since being a stepdad to his wife Gwen Stefani’s three sons.

“I’ve had stepparents,”  Shelton said. “I think it’s, in some ways, harder more difficult. I try to be careful about when to step back ... and just talk, but no matter what, always be there if I’m needed.”

Stefani shares her three children, 17-year-old Kingston, 15-year-old Zuma, and nine-year-old Apollo, with her ex-husband Gavin Rossdale. Soon after divorcing Rossdale, the “Just a Girl” singer met Shelton while being coaches on The Voice together. The two tied the knot in 2021.

“I didn’t see any of this coming with Blake. This was just a big old ‘What?’ It was an amazing gift to experience love like that for the first time,” Stefani confessed in an interview with People. “He’s changed my life ... when I [started dating] Blake, that’s when I felt home, like: ‘Oh, this is where I’m supposed to be, with this guy.’”

Their home base is now in the “Sooner State” amid open land. For Stefani, who grew up in Southern California, she has been surprised to find she is now a “garden flower nerd”.

“When I was young, I’d walk home from school and see my mom in her shorts doing her gardening, and my dad would be cutting the trees and make me pick up the branches,” Stefani said. “I’d be like: ‘I’m never having a tree at my house.’”

“When we get to Oklahoma, we’re constantly working — and it’s a different kind of work,” she continued. “It’s probably what my mom was doing back in the day, and now I get it!”

In conversation with People, she opened up about prioritising her children, and spoke about a special time in her life when she brought her eldest on tour with her.

“I took Kingston on a world tour [when he was nine months old]. I would have to nurse him, then get onstage, come off, and he would twirl my ponytail,” Stefani remarked. “That’s when things got really hard for me emotionally. That time is so precious, and you don’t want to miss anything.”

Though she’s continuing her journey as a mentor on The Voice, Stefani’s trying her best to manage a balance between work and home.

“When my kids were teenagers, I really wanted to make sure that I was home for them,” she noted. “And here we are.”

While Shelton has since become a stepfather to Stefani’s three sons, her ex-husband recently revealed on the Not So Hollywood podcast that he doesn’t “really co-parent” with Stefani and her new husband. The rocker cited their “opposing views” stemming from the fact that both parties are “really different people.”

“I think you can go one of two ways,” Rossdale explained on the podcast in June. “You can either do everything together... or you can just parent. And I think we just parent.”