Eva Mendes Gets Emotional About Her Biggest Parenting Struggle

Like many A-list actors, Eva Mendes’ life might not often seem relatable. But when she opened up publicly this week about her struggle not to yell at her children or to parent using fear. Breaking generations-long cycles of trauma is something many parents can relate to.

The 50-year-old entertainer appeared on the podcast Parenting & You With Dr. Shefali on October 15 and got emotional talking about how she was raised by her own parents — and how she wants to do differently.

Specifically, the Training Day star spoke about how she feels about yelling at her kids, how she thinks there’s a cultural connection, and how she’s trying to solve the problem.

“I think one of the hardest patterns for me is yelling. Because I don’t yell when they need me,” she shared on the podcast. “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.”

Mendes shares two daughters, Esmeralda, 10, and Amada, 8, with husband and fellow entertainer Ryan Gosling.

“I’m having a hard time getting through and not yelling,” she continued. “The rushing and the yelling, that’s the hardest thing to me.”

It is so, so hard not to yell when you are trying to get your kids out the door on time for something.

She explained why she find her parenting yelling cultural.

“My mother was definitely, again, so loving and so amazing but it was definitely like raising us by fear. That whole thing. That I really talk about being conscious of,” she said.

“I hope I don’t look back in 20 years and go ‘oh shoot,’ because I really don’t want to raise by fear,” Eva noted, getting choked up. “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.”

Mendes was born in Miami, Florida, to two Cuban parents and grew up in Los Angeles raised by her single mom, Eva Pérez Suárez. She’s the middle child of three.

“When I was in my 20s, for sure, I’m like, ‘I’m not gonna be like my parents,’ you know, that whole thing,” she said. “And I’m shocked by how much I’m like my mother. I adore her. She’s on a pedestal. But 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 reflected that her mom had a “very difficult childhood full of trauma,” and that the problem was generational as well as cultural.

It’s a topic that is very front-of-mind for the actor.

“A lot of times when people meet my girls and they say, ‘Oh, they’re so respectful and they’re so sweet.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, thank you,’ but I’m like, Oh no, I hope that they’re just mimicking what they see and I hope that I’m not unknowingly putting some kind of pressure on them through fear like I was raised in that way, through threats and fears.”

As they often say in parenting: if you thinking about an issue a lot and working on it and trying to break the cycle — even if you’re not doing a perfect job, you’re moving in the right direction. And you’re showing just how much you love your kids.