Nick Cannon is not pretending to be neutral. The 45-year-old television host and father of 12 publicly acknowledged this week that he holds his 15-year-old twins, whom he shares with ex-wife Mariah Carey, to entirely different dating standards, giving son Moroccan the green light while shutting the door completely on daughter Monroe.
Speaking during a recent public appearance, Cannon made no attempt to dress up the disparity.
“My son [Moroccan] has been dating, and I’ve allowed it, I encouraged it,” Cannon said while discussing the dating rules he applies differently to each twin, according to US Magazine. When the conversation turned to Monroe, his tone shifted entirely. \
According to Page Six, Cannon stated that if his daughter started dating, he would go to jail, his way of saying he has banned her from dating entirely.
The America’s Got Talent and The Masked Singer host did not shy away from labeling his own approach. He called it a “double standard,” and that candor, more than anything else, has sparked conversation among parents across the country.
A Double Standard With a Long History
What Cannon describes is neither new nor unique to celebrity households.
A peer-reviewed study from the University of Michigan, led by William G. Axinn of the Institute for Social Research, found that gender double standards in parental attitudes toward courtship and family formation are widespread, persistent, and likely underestimated due to methodological limitations in previous research.
The authors used a random-assignment experiment specifically designed to control for social desirability—meaning that parents who might publicly claim to treat sons and daughters equally were still revealing underlying differences in their actual attitudes.
The study’s authors wrote, “We argue there are strong theoretical reasons to expect that the magnitude of this double standard varies across substantive domains, as well as amongst parents and non-parents,” attributing the finding to correspondence with Axinn at the University of Michigan, published in PMC/NCBI.
In other words, the gap between how parents think about a son dating versus a daughter dating is not uniform — it shifts depending on the specific behavior in question, and it shows up even among people who consider themselves progressive.
The research also traced these attitudes back further than most parents might expect. Scholars have documented that gender differentiated treatment begins as early as infancy, with distinct behavioral expectations reinforced throughout childhood.
By the time a child reaches adolescence, those patterns are deeply embedded in both the parent and the child.
Why Fathers of Daughters Often React Differently
Cannon’s comment about ‘going to jail,’ reported by Page Six as his stated rationale for banning Monroe from dating, reflects a fear response that many fathers of teenage girls describe — a protective instinct that, when examined closely, often reveals assumptions about female vulnerability that are not applied equally to sons.
The logic tends to go: a boy’s dating is a rite of passage, while a girl’s dating is a risk to be managed.
That framing, however well intentioned, carries real consequences. When daughters receive the message that their romantic lives require more parental control than their brothers’ do, it can shape how they understand their own autonomy, their right to make decisions, and even how they evaluate risk in relationships later in life.
University of Michigan research found that parental attitudes toward courtship and family formation are strongly correlated with children’s subsequent behavior — meaning the rules parents set now carry forward into adulthood.
What makes Cannon’s comments notable is not the double standard itself — that is, as the research confirms, extremely common. What stands out is that he named it. Many parents apply these same unequal rules without ever acknowledging the inconsistency, let alone saying it out loud in a public setting.
Cannon’s willingness to call his own approach a double standard at least opens the door to a conversation that most families never have.
Whether that conversation leads to any change in his household is another matter. Monroe and Moroccan are both 15, navigating the same developmental stage, social pressures, and emotional landscape of adolescence. The only difference, according to their father, is their gender.
Why This Matters for Parents
Cannon’s admission is worth sitting with, even if you are not a celebrity with 12 children. Most parents of teenagers have wrestled with some version of this question — how much freedom is appropriate, and does the answer change depending on whether you have a son or a daughter? The honest answer, for many families, is yes. And the research suggests that admitting that gap is the first step toward examining whether it actually serves your kids.
The University of Michigan study found that the social pressure to appear egalitarian can actually mask the true size of the double standard, meaning parents often underreport how differently they think about sons versus daughters when it comes to dating.
Cannon, who should be the last person on Earth providing dating advice of any kind, said the quiet part out loud. That kind of transparency, whatever you think of the underlying rule, at least gives families something real to talk about.
As Monroe and Moroccan move through their teenage years, the rules their father sets now will shape not just their dating lives but their broader understanding of fairness, gender, and what it means to be trusted. That is a conversation worth having at every kitchen table, not just in celebrity households.
