Big Sean on What He's Learned as a Father: 'Be Confident in Who You Are'

Big Sean welcomed his first child, Noah, with Jhené Aiko in November 2022.

Over the last two years, the Detroit native has learned a lot about what it means to be a father—and how raising a child is like holding a mirror up to yourself.

“It's like time traveling,” Sean said in a recent episode of On Purpose with Jay Shetty. “People always try and figure out how to preserve themselves. There's the expression, ‘Oh, I'm living through my kids.”

He continued, “I think that your blood, your lineage…you really do time travel.”

Sean then mused about how he looked like his paternal grandfather, who passed when he was little.

“I never even met him,” Sean Don explained. “But he's a part of me too, and I think that's also why it's important to work on yourself and to heal certain traumatic experiences because with all this information we pass on, you also pass on the good and the bad. … It is really important to work on yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually because you pass on all of that.”

When Shetty asked the Better Me Than You rapper about something he doesn’t want to pass on to his son, Sean replied, “Worry.”

He added, “I used to…create all of these scenarios in my head, and I think that's like a double-edged sword—when you have an imagination. You're creative, you create, right? So, you can create good, you could create bad.”

Sean explained that one of his “biggest fears” was that he would lose everything and have to move back to Detroit.

“I shouldn't be scared to lose any of this stuff because this stuff is conditional and it's like, I'm gonna be good wherever I'm at,” he said.

“You imprint that in a young child by building up his confidence—and that's one of the things I love about my boy. It's like, he's so confident. … That's something that I want to keep feeding him.”

“One of the things I want to pass on to him is [to] be confident in who you are because you have what it takes. You can already tell he has a great heart. He has a great spirit. He loves…trying to make people laugh. … [I] just wanna keep [watering] that confidence in him.”

You can watch the podcast episode above.