Eva Mendes may not share photos from her family life with Ryan Gosling, but she aims to keep it real as a mother to their two daughters, Esmeralda and Amada.
This includes talking about some of the hardest parts of parenting, and the habits she has been trying to grow out of from how she was raised by her parents.
Speaking in an episode of Parenting & You With Dr. Shefali, Eva revealed that one of the "hardest patterns" for her to break is "yelling."
She explained: "I don’t yell when they need me," adding: "I'm never like 'shut up.' It's not like a 'mean' yell, but it doesn’t matter. I yell. And it's this yelling that I find so cultural."
"I'm having a hard time getting through and not yelling," the 50-year-old said. "The rushing and the yelling, that's the hardest thing to me."
The confession seemed to make Eva emotional, as she confessed: "I hope I don’t look back in 20 years and go 'oh shoot,' because I really don’t want to raise by fear. That's the one—sorry, I get emotional over it—because it’s so not fair to the kids."
"I hope that I’m not unknowingly putting some pressure on them through fear like I was raised," she added tearfully, referring to her own childhood.
Raised by Cuban parents Eva Pérez Suárez and Juan Carlos Méndez, she said that she was surrounded by love as a child — but also an element of fear.
This meant that when she was in her 20s, Eva adamantly wanted to not be like her parents, only to realize: "I'm shocked [by] how much I'm like my mother. I adore her. She’s on a pedestal… but yeah, my household when I was little was very chaotic, a lot of screaming, a lot of anxiety, a lot of turmoil, even though I had a loving family."
She explained her mom's behavior, telling Dr. Shefali that Eva Sr. had a "very difficult childhood full of trauma," but it meant that "a lot of shame came up for me because I was like, 'I have it so good. My mom, she fought to get here. I was the only one born in the States. How dare I even complain?'"
Eva previously admitted that she's glad to have had children later on in life, as: "In my 20s, I shouldn't have even been around a child. I was just foul-mouthed and smoking. I could not have raised kids in any other era of my life but now, for sure."
She described stepping away from the limelight as "The easiest decision I've ever made," adding: "I was older and I knew that my kids are going to be little once, and whatever I do or don't do right now is going to affect them the rest of their life."