Television presenter and actor Nick Cannon thinks monogamy is a Eurocentric concept.
Cannon fathered four of his seven children in the last year.
“Cannon welcomed twins Zion Mixolydian and Zillion Heir with Abby De La Rosa on June 14. His son Zen, whom he shares with model Alyssa Scott, was born nine days after Zillion and Zion. Additionally, Cannon welcomed daughter Powerful Queen back in December with Brittany Bell, with whom he also shares 4-year-old son Golden. Cannon is also dad to 10-year-old twins (son Moroccan and daughter Monroe) with ex-wife Mariah Carey,” says People Magazine.
Cannon appeared on The Breakfast Club on Monday and discussed leaving a legacy with Charlamagne Tha God and DJ Envy.
When pressed about having multiple children with so many women, Cannon said monogamy was "a Eurocentric concept ... just to classify property.”
“Like, just the idea that a man should have one woman — we shouldn’t have anything. I have no ownership over this person. If we really talking about how we coexist and how we populate, it’s about what exchange can we create together,” he said.
He added: “Those women and all women are the ones that open themselves up to say, 'I would like to allow this man in my world and I will birth this child.' So it ain't my decision, I'm just following suit."
Previously, Cannon had said on the Power 106 Los Angeles radio show, “I’m having these kids on purpose. I didn’t have no accident. Trust me, there’s a lot of people that I could’ve gotten pregnant that I didn’t. The ones that got pregnant are the ones that were supposed to get pregnant.”
In 2019, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that 1,498,113 children were born to unmarried mothers. This is nearly 40% of all births in the United States.
“Nonmarital childbearing in the United States increased from the 1940s to the 1990s, peaked in 2007–2008, and declined in 2013,” noted the CDC.
According to W. Bradford Wilcox, Ph.D., director of the National Marriage Project and associate professor of sociology, children raised by married parents tend to do better in school and have fewer behavioral problems than kids raised by cohabiting parents, per Parents Magazine. This might be because, according to data from the National Marriage Project, unmarried parents who live together are three times more likely than married parents to separate by the time their child turns five.
Regionally, attitudes towards commitment and having children before marriage vary greatly.
In Mississippi, 54.9% of babies were born to unmarried mothers in 2019 — the highest in the nation. Neighboring states Alamaba and Louisiana were also among the top five states reporting unmarried mothers. In contrast, Wyoming’s marriage rate was among the highest in the nation in 2019, reporting 33.6% of babies born in the state that year were to born to unmarried mothers.