Eva Mendes Gets Choked Up Discussing Parenting Habit She’s Trying to Break: ‘I Yell’

It’s tough trying to make the right choices as a mom — even if you’re as famous as Eva Mendes.

The actress became emotional as she admitted that there was one parenting habit she is desperately trying to shake during an appearance on the Tuesday, October 15 episode of “Parenting & You With Dr. Shefali.”

Mendes shares two daughters, Esmeralda Amada, 10, and Amada Lee, 8, with partner Ryan Gosling, 43, and touched on “yelling” at her kids.

“I think one of the hardest patterns for me is yelling. Because I don’t yell when they need me,” Mendes, 50, said 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.”

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

Mendes has a Cuban background and while she grew up loved, she explained that her parents Eva Pérez Suárez and Juan Carlos Méndez used “fear” to keep her in line while raising her.

Mendes seemed to choke up as she said that “fear” was something she wanted to avoid instilling in her own children.

“I hope I don’t look back in 20 years and go, ‘Oh, shoot,’ because I really don’t want to raise by fear,” Mendes said. “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, who took a break from her Hollywood career to raise her and Gosling’s daughters, recently spoke out about feeling “lost” once her kids reached middle childhood.

“I actually didn’t feel lost, I felt very clear,” Mendes said on The Drew Barrymore Show in September of initially becoming a mother. “But, then I felt lost, if that makes sense. Then when it was like the cliché of, ‘OK, who am I now that the kids can survive on their own?’”

She continued, “They’re only 8 and 10, but, you know what I mean, they don’t need me every second. It’s a little different.”

Meanwhile, Gosling admitted in May that he will no longer take on “dark” acting roles so it won’t affect his home life, including Mendes and their daughters.

“I don’t really take roles that are going to put me in some kind of dark place,” Gosling told the Wall Street Journal at the time. “This moment is what I feel like trying to read the room at home and feel like what is going to be best for all of us. The decisions I make, I make them with Eva and we make them with our family in mind first.”