Timbaland Says Fatherhood Helped Him Find Balance: ‘Success Could Have Destroyed Me'

Timbaland believes that fatherhood rescued him from falling into the chaos of fame.

The superproducer sat down with his daughter, Reign Mosley, for the fifth episode of her podcast, Reign Check on August 13. Timbaland shares Reign with his ex-wife, Monique Idlett, while his sons Demetrius Mosley and Frankie Mosley are from previous relationships. Timbaland, real name Timothy Mosley, and Idlett divorced in 2013 after ten years of marriage.

Around the ten-minute mark of the video below, Reign asked her father about the shifted dynamic between success and fatherhood. Although his perspective on fatherhood didn't change upon becoming a multimillionaire, Timbaland shared that he needed to become a parent to maintain his equilibrium.

"It didn't really shift my perspective on fatherhood. It probably made me have a
more respect for fatherhood," the four-time Grammy winner told his daughter. "It kind of gave my success a purpose in a way. I really think it was needed."

"Fatherhood was needed in my life because success could have destroyed me because you get caught up in so many things," Timbo added.

"But being that I was raised a certain way and I always...God will place things that that he that you don't know that you need in your life and fatherhood was the thing that I needed to balance success. Because if I didn't, I could have been destroyed."

In March, Timbaland was a guest on The Pivot Podcast, and around the 28-minute mark, he shared that the presence of his wife and children kept a "demon" from "attacking" him through opioid addiction. In 2020, the producer revealed to Men's Health that his addiction to OxyContin and Percocet began in 2013, just two years after he was prescribed the medications after a root canal.

"Then looking at your kids and really saying, like, 'I have value in this world,'" he said on The Pivot Podcast. "I love my kids to death...That's what I work for so, you know, just a lot of things that God just sit down like showing you your life and you start looking at [it.] I'm like, 'Man, I had a amazing life, but I could have did this better, I could have did that better."

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