Blake Shelton has accomplished a lot so far in his life. He’s had a highly decorated country music career, served as a coach on The Voice for 23 seasons, produces Hallmark Christmas movies with his mother and has opened multiple locations of his bar Ole Red. However, it sounds like the thing that has possibly brought him the most gratification has been his role as stepfather to Gwen Stefani’s three sons. The singer has talked a lot about how Kingston, Zuma and Apollo have changed him, and he recently opened up about the lesson he had to learn “quickly.”
Fans got to witness the relationship between Blake Shelton and Gwen Stefani from the very beginning, as the two met on The Voice and their relationship developed in front of our very eyes. In 2021, they got married on his Oklahoma farm, and Shelton told ET that his three stepsons have changed him “in every possible way” since then. He divulged:
I learned quickly, not because anything happened, but just, you know, reading the room, you’ve really got [to think], 'I have to take a step back.' When people say it's not about you anymore when you have a kid... I think, if you're doing it right, it's not about you anymore. That's true.
Knowing his role within the family dynamic sounds like something Blake Shelton finds important about being a stepfather. He indicates that his needs and feelings aren’t the priority when it comes to the three kids Gwen Stefani shares with ex-husband Gavin Rossdale, and that was apparently something he had to learn when going from being a bachelor to dating a woman with three children.
His willingness to “step back” is something Blake Shelton has talked about before, as he said last year that he allows his own experiences with stepparents to inform how he approaches situations with Kingston, Zuma and Apollo. Late in 2023, he said he tries to “be careful about when to step in and be smart about when to step back,” and that the most important thing is that the boys know he’s there if they need him.
Having that responsibility of being someone his stepsons can lean on is something Blake Shelton hadn’t experienced before. He has said it gave him self-worth, but more like “the opposite of self-worth because you put yourself way down on the rung, and they move up ahead of you.”
There’s no doubt Blake Shelton takes being a stepdad seriously, and his attitude is likely one of the reasons Gavin Rossdale said he knows his sons are “loved and supported,” regardless of whose house they’re at. Gwen Stefani and Rossdale don’t co-parent, according to the Bush frontman, because they have such different parenting styles. That, however, gives his boys “an incredible perspective to then choose which pieces of those two lives they’d like to inherit and move on with.”
Parenting and step-parenting can be a tricky business, but it sounds like Gwen Stefani’s sons have three people who doing their best to put the kids’ needs first.
