Nick Cannon admitted that having so many kids was a trauma response.
The father of 12 children appeared on The Breakfast Club, where he shared that it wasn’t until he started therapy that he realized he wasn’t healing from certain traumatic events in his life, including his divorce from Mariah Carey.
“It wasn’t like I was acting out,” Cannon said of having so many kids, at around the 38:40 minute mark. “It was more of being careless, being frivolous with my process, because I could do it, because I had the money, because I had the access to whoever and however I wanted to move.”
“[As] opposed to doing a mature thing and saying, ‘Hey, well, it probably makes more sense to do this.’ And then, obviously, life happens as well. So it wasn’t like, ‘Well, I’m gonna go have 12 kids.’ It was more about, like, ‘Yo, I’mma just live life and have fun and whatever happens, happens, I can handle it.’”
He then spoke on some of the realizations he’s had through therapy.
“Being almost 45 now, I can sit back and be like, if I would have thought the process through a little bit more and took time to actually do the inner work, things might have been a little different in certain scenarios.”
When Loren Lorosa asked him if he wouldn’t have had 12 kids, Cannon said, “I don’t know, and I’ve always said this, every child that I have was made out of love.
“And it was strong relationships," he added. "It’s just if I would have done the work and the healing after getting divorced, I probably would have took my time in a lot of other scenarios. I thought that was the answer a lot of times. It was like, ‘Oh, I’mma figure it out over here. I’mma figure it out over here, [as] opposed [to] leaving trauma every step of the way, instead fixing it from its origin.”
The comedian, actor, and host shares 12 women with six women, including twins with Carey. His penchant for having children dominated headlines for a few years. It seemed like he wasn’t slowing down either, particularly when he made comments like, “Only God can tell me if I'm done,” on the podcast, The Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman, in 2023.
The last child Cannon welcomed was in 2022. That year, he and Alyssa Scott welcomed their daughter, Halo, his second with Scott. Sadly, the pair’s first child, Zen, passed away in 2021 from brain cancer when he was five months old.