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Nick Cannon attends WayMaker Men’s Summit Presented By BET Experience – Day 2 at The Beehive on June 06, 2025 in Los Angeles, California.

Paras Griffin/Getty Images

Nick Cannon now believes deciding to have 12 children was a response to trauma.

While sitting down with The Breakfast Club, Cannon spoke on his mental health journey and admitted that he was dealing with trauma after going through his divorce with Mariah Carey. And when he was asked by co-host Charlamagne Tha God if the Wild-N-Out creator thought having 12 kids with six different women was a response to his trauma, he said yes.

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“I’m learning that now, and it wasn’t like I was acting out,” Cannon said. “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. 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 added: “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’ve been a little different in certain scenarios.’”

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Co-host Loren Lorosa then asked if he still would have had 12 kids, to which Nick responded that he wasn’t sure. “I don’t know … I’ve always said this: Every child that I had was made out of love and they was strong relationships,” he answered. “If I would’ve did the work and the healing after getting divorced, I probably would’ve took my time in a lot of other scenarios. And for whatever reason, 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,’ opposed to like leaving trauma every step of the way, instead of fixing it from its origin and then being able to present itself. But concepts like monogamy, I still feel the same way.”

Back in 2022, Nick Cannon revealed that he practices consensual non-monogamy, and in 2024, he said that he had been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder.

You can watch the full episode below.

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