One Baby After Another: Why So Many of 2025's Best Movies Are About the Agony and Ecstasy (but Mostly Agony) of Having Kids

""This is a great time to be a parent. Actually, please allow me to clarify that: This is a profoundly godawful fucking time to be a parent on almost every conceivable level (which might explain why fewer Americans than ever are choosing to have children), but - if you put aside the looming danger of authoritarianism, the prohibitive cost of childcare, the rising tides of ecological catastrophe, the brain-wormed fight to deprive people of miraculous vaccines, the national indifference towards mass shootings, the fact that our hyper-stratified economy is only being held together by sticky tack, and the imminent threat that " Wicked: For Good" poses to us all - it's a great time to be a parent who watches a lot of new movies, if only because it suddenly feels like most of the really good ones are about us.""

""It goes without saying that stories of parenthood have been endemic to the medium since the silent age ("six reels of Joy" promised the poster for Charlie Chaplin's "The Kid"), but it's hard to remember a time when the subject has dominated screens to the extent that it has so far this year. Paul Thomas Anderson's " One Battle After Another " - a first-ballot inductee into the #GirlDad Cinema Hall of Fame, as well as a convincing argument that raising kids right can be a revolutionary act unto itself - is merely the most obvious example of a trend that was first seeded back at Sundance, and has only grown more pronounced across the last nine months.""

Parenthood has become a dominant theme in recent cinema, with numerous notable films centering on the experience of raising children. Films examine the practical, political and existential challenges of parenting amid authoritarian threats, high childcare costs, climate crisis, vaccine misinformation, mass shootings and deepening economic inequality. The trend builds on cinema's long history of parenthood narratives dating to the silent era, and recent festival seasons have amplified the focus. Directors use parental relationships to explore larger social questions, portraying child-rearing as both a personal struggle and a potentially transformative, even revolutionary, act.

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