Eva Mendes is getting candid about parenting.
If you didn’t know, Eva, 50, shares two kids with husband Ryan Gosling: Esmeralda, 10, and Amada, 8.
Last week, Eva appeared on Dr. Shefali’s Parenting & You podcast for a candid conversation about the hardships of parenting.
Dr. Shefali is a clinical psychologist, and Eva revealed she reached out to her with a “big SOS” after noticing herself repeating some of her mom's habits while disciplining her two daughters.
Eva was mainly raised by her mom, Eva Pérez Suárez, who emigrated to the US from Cuba.
While Eva made it clear that she was raised in a super loving household, she explained that there was also an element of fear.
“It’s so interesting because when I was in my 20s…I was like, ‘I'm not gonna be anything like my parents,’” she said before adding, “I’m shocked [by] how much I'm like my mother. And I adore her.”
“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, and I still have a loving family,” she said.
“My mom had a very difficult childhood full of trauma,” she explained, noting that she sometimes feels “shame” and “guilt” when speaking negatively of her childhood because of what her mom went through.
“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?'" she said.
When asked about which parenting “patterns” she finds herself repeating, Eva said that one of the “hardest” to break is “yelling.”
“I don’t yell when they need me,” she said. “I’m never like, ‘Shut up.’ It's not 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 rushing and the yelling, that's the hardest thing to me.”
Adding that her mother used “threats and fears” to discipline her, Eva teared up as 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. 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.
