Justin Timberlake: Fatherhood 'broke me down' at first

Justin Timberlake is getting real about the struggle of parenting.

The Can't Stop the Feeling singer graces the cover of The Hollywood Reporter to talk about his career, his friendship with Jimmy Fallon and his son Silas, 22 months.

"Would I want my child to follow my path?" Timberlake told the magazine when asked if he wanted Silas to go into show business. "You know, I haven’t been able to answer that question in my mind. If he wanted it bad enough, I suppose I could teach him a lot about what not to do."

The singer, now 36, who spent his pre-teen and teen years singing and dancing on The New Mickey Mouse Club, has had Hollywood in his life for two decades.

"I have some faint images from my childhood," he says. "(But) I can’t really remember not being famous."

Timberlake added that the bad parts of his young life have informed his parenting choices.

"You go through your life with your own traumas, big and small, and think, ‘It’s not that bad, I have a lot to be thankful for, my parents did the best they could,'" he said. "But then you have a child of your own, and suddenly it opens all the floodgates, and you’re like, 'No, no, no! That childhood trauma really did (expletive) me up!'"

"At first, it broke me down," he said of adding "dad" to his ever-growing resume. "Those first eight months felt like those old (Ed Sullivan) shows where people are balancing spinning plates on poles — except if you drop one, they die."

Still, Timberlake finds the joys in fatherhood, too. Like bonding with Silas over his Oscar and Grammy-nominated single Can't Stop the Feeling, which he says he'd "never have written if it weren't for (Silas)."

"Watching him jump around to Can’t Stop the Feeling starting to learn words because of that song — it’s the best thing in the world."

Read the full interview here.