Blake Shelton has ‘fallen in love’ with his wife’s Gwen Stefani’s three children

Blake Shelton loves Gwen Stefani’s children as much as he loves her.

‘The Voice’ coach got the blueprint on being a great stepfather to Gwen’s children, Kingston, 15, Zuma, 13, and eight-year-old Apollo – who she has with ex-husband Gavin Rossdale – from his own father, who took on his older brother Richie when he started dating his mother.

The 45-year-old country star – whose sibling died in 1990 aged just 24 – said: “He took Richie on and raised him from the time he was one year old, and my brother never thought of my dad as anything other than his dad. The example that my dad set for me was that [child] was not even a consideration [in a romantic partnership]. You got three boys? Awesome! My dad did it. My dad raised me. I could do this. I didn’t know what I was signing up for, but I was all about signing up for it. And every day I’ve fallen in love with the boys as much as I do with Gwen.”

Blake – who started dating the ‘Hollaback Girl’ hitmaker in 2015 and married last year – loves showing the older two about the fun involved in rural life after they were raised in urban and glam Los Angeles.

Of Kingston and Zuma, he said at the Country Radio Seminar in Nashville: “The two of them were like, ‘Well, what do we do now? I go, ‘Go out that door and don’t come back till you’re too tired to go any further.’ Well, they can’t even imagine just going down to the creek with a net or turning over rocks or getting on a buggy and driving around.”

The move to father figure came as the Grammy nominee has been considering “stripping some thing away” from his professional life.

He said: “What I’ve been looking forward to doing for the last four or five years … is eyeing that timeline, that part of my career, where I just need to start stripping some things away. You gotta get some life in there, and marrying Gwen, I’ve married into a family. She’s got three boys … and all of a sudden you go, there’s other stuff.”