25 Movies That Basically Sum Up Life as a Mom

Brave is basically a mother-daughter love story, and it moves us to tears almost every time. It so perfectly captures the tension that mothers face in trying to find the balance between keeping our kids safe and on the right path with their desire to find their own way and become independent. And, seriously, how can we not love a movie where a mother literally goes full-on mama bear when her child is threatened?

The biggest Oscars hit of 2023 was the weird and inventive Everything Everywhere All at Once. While the movie is a frenetic visual spectacle with multiple storylines, at the heart of it all is a frazzled mom who is missing out on a better relationship with her daughter because she is spread too thin. Umm, relatable much?

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We need to be honest: Sometimes motherhood can be heartbreaking, especially for mothers who can’t keep their children safe in a world where racism and prejudice are still all too real. While Till is a historical drama (based on the deeply sad real-life story of Emmett Till), mothers of Black children can still relate to the fear that can come from knowing that their safety isn’t guaranteed.

In addition to being a timeless classic novel about the joys and sorrows of sisterhood, Little Women is also the story of a mother doing her best to hold her family together in challenging circumstances. We love that Marmee is a mother who loves each of her very different daughters for exactly who they are, something we all probably strive to do.

Listen, we’re moms. We love our kids and work hard all day to take care of our families. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve gone blind or have lost the ability to be VERY INTERESTED in a hot, shirtless man (especially when he is hanging out with his hot and shirtless friends). The Magic Mike movies are the perfect way to remember we’re moms, but not just moms.

A Quiet Place is a horror movie, but it’s also our lives when the baby is sleeping and we know we can’t make a single noise, lest they wake up. We’ll go as far to silence the phones, watch TV on mute, and put notes on the door warning people not to ring the bell. We’d like to think us moms would do OK in the Quiet Place world. We’ve got a lot of practice.

Some movies try to make motherhood seem like a breeze, but This Is 40 gets honest about getting older and parenting older children. In this film, the two daughters hate each other, and the constant bickering starts wearing on the whole family. Have two, they said! Give them a friend! Well, the best-laid plans and all that. At least Leslie Mann knows what we’re going through.

All the rules that Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) has for surviving zombies are easily transferable to rules for raising kids: Always wear a seatbelt, double-check that we have everything we need when we go anywhere, and get good at cardio, so we can chase down our little ones. Plus, the only eaters messier than zombies are toddlers. Those spills take forever to clean up.

Sarah Jessica Parker stars in this movie about trying to have it all: the mom life and the working life. The secret? She can’t, and that’s OK to admit. Acting like it’s possible to have it all makes those of us who don’t have it all together feel worse about ourselves. We need movies like this to show us that being a mom is hard and being a working mom is next to impossible at times. The real secret to “having it all” is just doing our best with what we’ve got.

Although this movie is about a father’s bond with his son, moms can see themselves in all of the parenting moments as well. Marlin is pretty overprotective of his son, Nemo, because he just wants to keep him safe. We can all relate to that. We can also relate to going to the ends of the earth for our kids. The moral of this movie is that parents will stop at nothing to help their children, but that it’s also OK to allow our kids some space to grow. Who knew that some of the best parenting lessons could come from an animated movie about fish?

In Kill Bill, Uma Thurman’s character is shot at the altar by her former lover while she’s pregnant. Eventually, she finds out her child survived and she does everything she can to get her back and keep her safe. Every mom can relate to doing anything for their children. Maybe not to the extent that happens in Kill Bill, but pretty close. Our kids are everything to us, and no one is messing with that.

Witnessing our child go through the terrible twos is honestly just like watching a really long showing of The Exorcist. Those tantrums. The refusal to sleep or eat when we say so. The general flailing around if we try to do anything they don’t want like get them dressed, put them in the car seat, etc. The movie is lucky that its possessed character is 12 and not a toddler.

This movie follows a group of moms who are exhausted by how hard everything can be. So they decide to be “bad moms” for once and live a little. But even when they’re being these “bad moms,” they’re still great mothers. They just stopped caring so much about the societal pressure to be and look and act perfect all the time. This movie is aspirational, really. We should all channel a little Bad Moms in our lives and cut ourselves some slack.

One of the best parts of The Incredibles is that it proves that it doesn’t matter if a mom is a literal superhero, she’ll still have to break up sibling squabbles, deal with crying babies, worry about hiring the right babysitter, and so on. So it totally doesn’t matter if we have it all together — because not even superheroes do. We may not be saving the world in a literal fashion, but we’re raising the world’s next generation and we’re our own kind of superhero.

Honestly, Damien — the kid from The Omen — makes our kids look like saints. All of Damien’s devilish acts will make moms think back on some moments when their own kids were behaving like demons. Whoever wrote this movie must have had firsthand experience with how quickly kids can get out of control and take down everything around them. Fortunately, our kids can grow out of that phase, while Damien just keeps on being terrifying.

It’s the famous line uttered by every child on any drive, no matter the duration. “Are we there yet?” No, we’re not. We love in The Incredibles when the kids ask Mr. Incredible this and he delivers the great answer, “We get there when we get there!” In the movie Are We There Yet?, a dad embarks on a road trip with his girlfriends’ kids, and soon realizes he’s in over his head. Every mom can relate to a road trip (or even a quick grocery store trip) that becomes a nightmare when kids get antsy in the car.

Every mom can relate to this movie, because it features so many different types of moms. We really connect with Elizabeth Banks’ character, whose pregnancy is not glowy or fun at all, and she gets real about it. Not every pregnancy is a magical experience, and we need to acknowledge that. No shame in having a rough nine months. At least having our babies makes the tough times worth it.

This is a pretty sad movie, because it follows a young woman who has been kidnapped and her son living in a small shack. But because it’s told from the point of view of the young child, we get to see just how much his mom has worked to make their situation more normal for him. They bake and play games to help him have as regular of a childhood as possible. It just goes to show that moms will do everything they can to help make their children feel safe and happy.

Being a mom of a teenager can be rough. We wish we could switch bodies with our teens for the day and show them what it’s like to be us for once. But until that technology is invented, we can rewatch Freaky Friday and dream of a day when our teen grows up and finally thanks us for all we’ve done.

Family vacations sound fun in theory, but executing them tests a mom’s every last nerve. Here’s an idea: Skip the vacation this year, and just watch National Lampoon’s Vacation with the family instead. There’s just as much bickering, getting lost, scheduling problems, and car trouble in the film as there would be on a real trip.

Similarly to Bad Moms, this is a movie about a group of preschool moms letting off steam for a night. They go drinking, sing karaoke, flirt with a cute bartender, and more. Maybe that sums up what some of us do with our girlfriends on the weekends, but mostly it just sums up what we wish we could be doing when dealing with diapers, tantrums, helping with homework, moody teens, and more. Fun Mom Dinner is a good reminder to take a little self-care time when possible and be “fun moms” — even if just for a night.

The children in this movie all exhibited various issues that our own kids deal with at times: greed; arrogance; straight-up ignoring authority figures. We’re pretty sure if our kids went to the chocolate factory, they could also end up as blueberries or falling into chocolate rivers for not listening to Willy Wonka’s instructions. It’s hard to get kids to behave in everyday life, let alone in a candy-coated wonderland.

Stay-at-home moms, this one’s for you. Uma Thurman plays a stay-at-home mom in this super honest movie about what motherhood is really like — including a moment when she accidentally wears her nightgown out of the house. This film puts it best when it says, “Motherhood is accepting things you can’t control.” It’s not easy, but seeing ourselves depicted on screen sure helps.

Another Leslie Mann movie! In Blockers, she plays a single mom who decides to tail her daughter to prom because she’s worried her daughter is going to have sex. Her methods are questionable, and she should probably just be talking to her daughter about this, instead of invading her privacy. But we can all relate to worrying about this kind of stuff — and probably wish we could pull a Leslie Mann and follow our kids everywhere.

Nothing gets past kids. Nothing. That’s why it was so funny in this Candace Cameron Hallmark movie when she plays identical twin sisters who swap places at Christmas. One mom’s kids immediately recognize that it was their aunt at the house and not their mom. But that mom made sure to tell the kids about the switch anyway — because we may joke around with our kids, but we would never make them question their whole world.