Kendall Jenner has revealed how her mental health has shaped her interest in becoming a parent.
In an episode of The Kardashians, which aired on 26 October, the 27-year-old reality star discussed how she’s not in a rush to have children, even though all of her famous sisters are mothers. Speaking to Scott Disick – the father of Kourtney Kardashian’s three children – Jenner expressed that she needed help taking care of her three-year-old dog, Pyro.
“He’s just wild. I’m having serious issues with him,” she said. “I swear he has really bad separation anxiety. He’s just a wild guy… I have anxiety, and I think he has anxiety.”
After claiming that “maybe [she’s] the problem” for her pet and questioned whether Pyro “feels [her] anxiety”, Disick asked her: “Do you have that much anxiety?”
In response, Jenner acknowledged how much she’s been struggling with her mental health, saying her anxiety has “been really bad lately”. When Disick wondered if her anxiety “has been worse than ever”, she replied yes and noted that it’s impacted her feelings about becoming a mother.
“It’s one of the reasons why I’m, like, actually scared to have children,” she said. Disick then chimed in to tell her that while she “can’t not have kids” because of her anxiety, it is still “scary”.
Jenner confessed that she’s concerned about how her anxiety may continue throughout her life, tying into her fear of having children. “Honestly, the scariest part for me is, I’m like, am I just gonna get worse throughout life?” she said. “Because I feel like it’s worse than ever right now. And I’m just like, the older I get, is it just gonna get worse, and worse, and worse?”
After Disick reassured Jenner by telling her that he suffered from bad anxiety that eventually “got better”, the model reflected on when her anxiety first started.
“I think I was about, like, eight, from what I remember,” she said in a confessional interview. “But I thought there was something physically wrong with me. Like, I made my mom take me to a heart doctor and a lung doctor and a brain doctor, and all these people ‘cause I thought something was wrong with me.”
She continued: “And at the time, too, people didn’t really talk about anxiety the way they do now. I never knew that that’s what that was until later in life.”
Jenner added that she’s “struggled with a little bit of guilt” for her feeling of anxiety, as she’s been blessed with many opportunities throughout her life. “I do have a lot of blessings, and I am a really lucky person,” she said. “And we all have s*** to a certain degree. So, I think just a little more compassion would be nice.”
Speaking to Disick, she also acknowledged that she’s “such a control freak“, which makes her wish that she “could fix or stop” her feelings of anxiety.
This isn’t the first time that Jenner has spoken candidly about her mental health. During an interview with Vogue in August 2022, she shared the nighttime ritual she’s used to help calm her anxiety before bed. “I like to wind down in the evenings,” she explained. “I usually drink tea and relax by reading a book or writing in my journal.”
“I have struggled with anxiety for years and it can have good and bad days,” she said, adding that 15 minutes of meditation has helped “settle [her] anxiety so [she] can get a good night’s rest.”
In May 2021, Jenner also revealed to Vogue that there have been times when her anxiety has made her feel like she needs “to be rushed to the hospital” because she’s had trouble breathing.
“I think that my heart is failing and I can’t breathe and I need, like, someone to help me,” she said. “Sometimes I think I’m dying. Sometimes parts of my body will go numb. And it can be really intense and scary.”
While Jenner has since revealed that her anxiety influences her thoughts on having children, she previously told Vogue in 2018 that she’s “ready to wait” to have kids until she’s “28 or 29”.
The model also recalled how “exciting” it was when her sister, Kylie, gave birth to her first child, Stormi, because she and the Kylie Cosmetics founder grew up together. “It’s not that it’s more exciting than any other births in the family – it’s different, exciting, because she’s my baby sister who I grew up with,” she explained.
“We all grew up in twos: Kourtney and Kim grew up together; Rob and Khloé; Brandon [Jenner] and Brody [Jenner]; Burton [Jenner] and Casey [Jenner], and then Kylie and I. So to see my best friend growing up have a baby? It’s already made us even closer.”
