Jelly Roll has "always been honest" with his kids about troubled past.
Jelly Roll has told his kids about his criminal past
The 39-year-old musician is dad to two children - daughter Bailee and son Noah from previous relationships - and he is keen to be candid with them about his previous brushes with the law, his jail time and substance abuse issues revealing he explained his troubles to them without using the words "drugs" or "addiction".
Speaking to the New York Times, Jelly Roll said: "[I have] always been honest' with them ... I was trying to describe what addiction was to an eight-year-old without using words like 'addiction' or 'drugs'."
During the interview the musician - real name Jason DeFord - was asked about a previous admission that becoming a dad while he was in prison prompted him to turn his life around and he insisted it's not that simple.
He explained: "I’m learning to forgive myself for the decisions I made when I was that young. They were wrong and I knew they were wrong, and I was doing them with a sense of pride and excitement. I was 15. I was so young ... I don’t know what could have helped me, to be honest ...
"I think that you saying that shows me that you’ve never been a part of that culture and never seen people have those rock-bottom experiences where they woke up and said, 'Today is the day I quit shooting heroin' ...
"There is a lot of steps after that. They have to go to rehab. They have to detox. There was a lot of steps I had to change. So yeah, maybe the change wasn’t dramatic but the decision was dramatic."
Jelly Roll revealed he first went to jail at the age of 13 after being caught with cannabis and then failing to go to court. He later served a year behind bars over his involvement in a robbery when he was 16 and the felony conviction means he cannot vote and was unable to travel internationally until recently.
He previously told Billboard: "I never want to overlook the fact that it was a heinous crime. This is a grown man looking back at a 16-year-old kid that made the worst decision that he could have made in life and people could have got hurt and, by the grace of God, thankfully, nobody did."