Eva Mendes Breaks Down In Tears Talking About Parenting Alongside Ryan Gosling

Eva Mendes is opening up about the struggles of parenting — and it can be an emotional subject!

The Hitch star appeared on Tuesday’s episode of Parenting & You with Dr. Shefali and fought back tears while speaking about her journey as a mother. Eva shares two young daughters with Ryan Gosling: 10-year-old Esmeralda, and 8-year-old Amada. But the struggle sometimes goes back to her own childhood.

Eva was raised by Cuban parents Eva Pérez Suárez and Juan Carlos Méndez. And while discussing “yelling” and trying to break the cycle of “parenting by fear,” the Ghost Rider star opened up about how she believes there’s a “cultural” aspect to it. The mom of two explained:

“I don’t yell when [my kids] need me. 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 rushing and the yelling, that’s the hardest thing to me.”

For the most part, though, it sounds like Eva tries to take a gentle approach… to not end up like her own mother:

“I really hope I’m not going to look back in 20 years and go, ‘Oh shoot.’ Because I really don’t want to raise by fear, like, that’s the one — I get emotional over it because it’s so not fair to the kids.”

Wiping tears from her eyes, she added:

“A lot of the 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 hope they’re just mimicking what they see. 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. That’s the most conscious thing I think I’m trying to be.”

What a good momma. Change always begins with recognition of a problem, and it sounds like that’s something she’s definitely accomplished.

Eva noted her mom was very “loving” and “amazing” — but that parenting style just wasn’t right to her. She’s determined to break the cycle. Whether she likes it or not, she sees a lot of her mother in herself — but she makes a conscious effort to not inflict some of the “trauma” she experienced as a child on her own kids:

“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.”

You can listen to Eva’s emotional full conversation (below):