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It’s hard to make the right choices as a mother, even when you’re so famous Eva Mendes.
The actress got emotional as she admitted there’s one parenting habit she’s desperately trying to shake during an appearance on the Tuesday, October 15, episode of ‘Parenting and you with Dr. Shefali.”
Mendes shares two daughters, Esmeralda Amada, 10, and Amada Lee, 8, with partner Ryan Gosling 43, and involved ‘yelling’ at her children.
“I think screaming is one of the hardest patterns for me. Because I don’t shout when they need me,” Mendes, 50, said on the podcast. “I’m never like ‘shut up.’ It’s not like a ‘mean’ shout, but that doesn’t matter. I scream. And it is this screaming that I find so cultural.”
She added: “I’m finding it hard to get through it and not scream. I find the rushing and the shouting the most difficult.”
Mendes has a Cuban background and while growing up, she explained that to her parents Eva Perez Suarez And Juan Carlos Mendez used “fear” to keep her in line while raising her.
Mendes appeared to choke up as she said “fear” was something she didn’t want to instill in her own children.
“I hope that in 20 years I don’t look back and think, ‘Oh, just shoot,’ because I really don’t want to parent through fear,” Mendes said. ‘That’s the only thing – sorry, it makes me emotional – because it’s not fair to the children. I hope I don’t unconsciously put any pressure on them out of fear, the way I was raised.”
Mendes, who took a break from her Hollywood career to raise her and Gosling’s daughters, recently spoke about feeling “lost” as her children entered middle childhood.
“I actually didn’t feel lost, I felt very clear,” Mendes continued The Drew Barrymore Show in September to initially become a mother. “But then I felt lost, if that makes sense. Then it seemed like the cliché of: ‘Okay, who am I now that the children can survive on their own?’
She continued, “They’re only eight and ten, 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 that it doesn’t impact his family life, including Mendes and their daughters.
“I don’t really play roles that put me in some sort of dark situation,” Gosling told the BBC Wall Street Journal at the time. “Right now I feel like reading the room at home and thinking about what will be best for all of us. The decisions I make, I make together with Eva and we make them with our family in mind first.”