Nick Cannon Says Fathering 12 Kids Was a Trauma Response to Mariah Carey Divorce, More

Nick Cannon is reflecting on what drove him to famously father a dozen kids — including 10 in the last eight years.

During an appearance on The Breakfast Club on Monday, September 15, Cannon confessed that having so many children was a response to his trauma stemming from his 2016 divorce from ex-wife Mariah Carey, 56.

“Yeah, I’m learning that now,” the Masked Singer host, 44, said.

“If I would have did the work [and] the healing after getting divorced, I probably would have took my time,” Cannon explained, but “for whatever reason I thought that was the answer a lot of times, like ‘Oh, I’m gonna figure it out over here.’”

“Now, you’re leaving trauma every step of the way instead of fixing it from its origin,” he admitted.

Cannon shares twins Moroccan and Monroe, 14, with Carey; sons Golden, 8, and Rise, who will be 3 on September 23, and daughter Powerful, 4, with Brittany Bell; twin sons Zion and Zillion, 4, and daughter Beautiful, 2, with Abby De La Rosa; son Legendary, 3, with Bre Tiesi; daughter Onyx, 3, with LaNisha Cole; and son Zen, who died at 5 months in 2021 and daughter Halo, 2, with Alyssa Scott.

“It’s a rich man’s sport,” he told TMZ last year of having so many children.

The Wild ’n Out host also revealed last year that he was diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, which the Mayo Clinic defines as a mental health condition in which someone has an “unreasonably high sense of their own importance.”

During his appearance on The Breakfast Club, he said he believes the condition — along with ADHD that a doctor told him might have been exacerbated by undiagnosed damage to his frontal lobe as a child — contributed to his difficulty handling the divorce and affected his subsequent relationships with women.

“And it wasn’t like I was acting out. It was more of being careless, being frivolous with my process because I could do it, because I had the money [and] because I had the access to whoever and however I wanted to move,” he said.

“I just didn’t do the work, so then I looked up 12 kids later and I’m like ‘Wow, I could have did things very differently,” Cannon continued. “But I stand firm on all of my decisions because I love all my kids, I love my family infrastructure, but I know it all started from a place of pain and not really healing properly.”

“Being almost 45 now, I could sit back and like, ‘yeah, 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,’” he added.