Nick Cannon says he’d “rather raise a bully” than watch any of his children become victims of one.
The father of 12 shared the take on an episode of the We Playin’ Spades podcast posted Monday (Nov. 24). He argued that kids need self-defense skills, whether parents think they’ll actually use them or not.
“First of all, for a man, there’s confidence in knowing how to fight, just being a protector,” Cannon said. “Because I was a very, very small child and I had taekwondo, and all that helped me and gave me a sense of confidence. But it didn’t happen until I got into a couple fights, and I was like ‘Oh, I’m nice.’ You gotta know what getting punched in the face feels like.”
Though Cannon stressed he’s not trying to tell anyone “how to raise their kids,” he held firm on the idea that self-defense builds confidence.
“I just want people to be like ‘Boy, them Cannons coming! They gon’ fuck you up. You see them Cannons?’” he joked.
Later in the conversation, the longtime Wild ’n Out host summed up his position plainly.
“I’d rather raise a bully than my child to be bullied,” he said, while acknowledging he was “raised at a different time.”
“At least teach a kid how to defend themselves,” he added.
The 45-year-old often sparks conversation with his parenting takes—as well as his jokes about having such a big family.
In a Breakfast Club interview earlier this year, Cannon said therapy opened his eyes to a lot of things, including a “careless” and “frivolous” phase in his life. Even so, the comedian—who shares two kids with ex-wife Mariah Carey—insisted that “every child” he has “was made out of love.”
