Robin Thicke Says Dad's Death Made Him a 'Better' Man

Robin Thicke was forced to do some soul-searching after the 2016 death of his father, Growing Pains star Alan Thicke.

The “Blurred Lines” singer, 42, spoke candidly about his having matured and embraced his role as family patriarch in recent years, a role he especially values now that he’s the father to two young daughters.

“I had a little maturing to do. Even though I was in my late 30s, still had a little maturing to do,” Thicke said on Steve Harvey’s talk show Steve in an interview airing Tuesday.

The singer explained that after the 2010 birth of son Julian Fuego with ex-wife Paula Patton, his career was just taking off, making it difficult to be a true family man.

“When you’re on the come up, you’re worried about yourself and your own future. And then you have all these other mouths to feed and hearts to take care of,” he said. “When my first son was born, I was still in the middle and the peak of some parts of my career. Then ‘Blurred Lines’ happened, and it was just, I was gone a lot.”

But after the death of his father, Thicke said he realized he had to step up to be there for his younger half-brother Carter, who was just 19 when their dad died.

“When my father passed, I became the patriarch of my family. My young 20-year-old brother, he needed a big brother, and it just felt like now I had to take it onto my shoulders to be a much better, more focused, man than I was before,” Thicke explained.

Meanwhile, the singer is also the patriarch of his own family with fiancée April Love Geary, 24, with whom he welcomed his second daughter on Feb. 26.

Little Lola Alain joined big sister Mia Love, who was born Feb. 22, 2018.

“There’s a feeling of, especially now that I have two daughters, I don’t want them to be, when they’re grown up, to not be proud of their father, and the man that I am,” he said. “I want to be a father that they can be proud of.”

The Masked Singer panelist popped the question to Geary on Christmas Eve, just months after the couple lost their Malibu home in the devastating wildfires that hit California in November.

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“We’ve been here for the last four years, and we’ve built so many memories with the birth of a new daughter and the maturing of my son,” he said during an interview with Zane Lowe of Apple Music’s Beats 1. “We just moved into a rental where we’ll be staying while we rebuild. But the plan is, is to rebuild and try to gain some of those memories back by going back to the place we love.”

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