The Most Unhinged Moms of 2025—And Why They Matter

The “snapped mom” was this year’s chosen jumpscare.

At the start of the year, while scrambling eggs for my sick and teething toddler, I turned hot with the lingering fever I’d fought off for days. I could feel it in my ears, my jaw: I was getting sick again.

That September we had had Covid, in November we caught Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease, then the flu, and, in December, norovirus. My phone buzzed. Our nanny was sick, too. I’d been dreaming of child care that day, of finally drafting an essay that was moments away from irrelevance, responding to some long-ignored emails, stretching to relieve the body pain from my daughter’s current insistence on being held, maybe even sneaking in a shower.

Now instead, a familiar feeling was developing in my chest. One I’d had more and more since having a baby, but that used to be triggered by traumatic or unusually stressful events. I was about to have a panic attack. The cause? Simply being a mother. 

Along with my daughter’s whining and husband’s soothing, the soundtrack to this scene was the audiobook The Motherload, a then new and buzzy memoir by Sarah Hoover playing on my kitchen’s Bluetooth speaker. It may seem too convenient that I was listening to a book subtitled Episodes From the Brink of Motherhood while I was approaching my own, but in 2025 stories about moms losing it were never hard to find. Plus, from watching Snapped (about women charged with murder) on Oxygen with my sister after school as a teenager to diligently consuming the books on everyone’s recent TBR pile—All Fours by Miranda July, Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker, and I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy—I’m something of an expert on the snapped mom genre. 

Just like the ever-popular cult and serial killer documentaries, a snapped mom narrative hits us in our vulnerable and reactive amygdala, creating a knee jerk adrenaline release that leaves us hungry for resolution. Like Amanda Montell says in her book Cultish, “The reason millions of us binge cult documentaries or go down rabbit holes researching groups from Jonestown to QAnon is not that there’s some twisted voyeur inside us all that’s inexplicably attracted to darkness…We’re not bored…We’re scanning for threats.”

She says we watch things that make us scared because we’re desperate to know, How might this happen to me? But this year, the innocent, even relatable, lens with which mothers-turned-criminals were portrayed in the media turned that regular “fear appeal” on its head, forcing us to consider how we might become the perpetrator, not the victim. Where serial killer documentaries and cult confessionals offer a perverse escapism, this year’s snapped mom genre came with a dose of dread. 

Snapped moms are scarier than ever because they’re just like us. They do their hair, have impressive jobs, seem invested in their children’s well-being before committing crimes, becoming addicts, abusing their children, and—like Sarah Hoover and I were simultaneously in my kitchen—having mental breakdowns. 

So without further ado, five moms who lost it in entertainment media this year.

Sarah Hoover, Motherload, A Memoir 

While I crouched behind the kitchen island trying to take box breaths through my stuffy nose, Sarah Hoover was finding bed bug bites on her son after a morning shitting the bed on a hellish Balinese vacation where carrying the mental load of her family had begun to break her. 

“How was I supposed to recover mentally or physically when no one cared about my mental or physical state?” a postpartum Hoover recounted bellowing at her husband. “Well you win, because I didn’t recover. Nothing is right. From my hips, to my belly, to my brain. To my hair. Nothing is right.”

Many reviewers commented that Hoover’s story missed the mark as it was marred by her privilege. What stuck with me most about this book and the hype around it, however, wasn’t that her complaints were too first world for memoir, but that evidently not even the most privileged moms among us can cope. 

In the first month Motherload was released, Ilana Glazer posted a video on Instagram encouraging her followers to read it, while hiding from her demanding two-year-old in the bathroom. Celebrity moms Busy Philipps and Stassi Schroeder took to their stories as well—in perfect outfits—to commiserate with all Hoover was dealing with in her postpartum mental collapse. These women are influential, well paid, and seemingly well-adjusted mothers, but their endorsements of the book seemed to say, “We’re doing it all, but not without significant mental decline.”

Ruby Franke, Devil in the Family

Snapped moms were a hot topic in true crime documentaries this year, starting with Hulu’s Devil in the Family, the February documentary that revealed how Ruby Franke went from a beloved Christian family blogger to a child abuser who physically and mentally tortured her children. 

While the actions of high profile mother/criminals like Ruby Franke, Unknown Number’s Kendra Licari, and Bad Influence momager turned abuser, Tiffany Smith, are extreme, their downfalls came from the same pedestrian woes listed in a JAMA Internal Medicine report from earlier this year. It found that one in 12 mothers rated their mental as fair or poor because of factors such as financial stress, job loss, and the pressure to be a good mom. With today’s mothers taking on almost twice as much of the childcare load as their male counterparts, resulting in significant decline in maternal mental wellness, we’re forced to wonder, where’s the line between burn out and breakdown? 

Devil in the Family ends with a montage of home videos from Ruby Franke’s life as a mother before she committed the crimes she ultimately pled guilty to. With hardly a moment to consider their answer, her husband and son admitted that they still love her. 

What lingered with me most about Devil in the Family wasn’t the ending or even the crime—it was the suggestion that any mother, under enough pressure, could be capable of it. 

Kendra Licari, Unknown Number

Netflix’s recent hit Unknown Number employs a similar seesaw between Kendra Licari’s innocent demeanor and sick actions to prey on a fear already well established in the modern-day woman. 

When we first see a criminal in a true crime documentary, they’re usually menacing and handcuffed. But in Unknown Number, Licari’s interview footage maintains an air of innocence around her. First as doting mother smitten by her daughter’s first relationship, and then as concerned bystander worrying over who might be brutally cyberbullying her child; right down to her final appearances after we learn she is behind the abusive texts, where she appeals directly to the viewer, asking in so many words, “aren’t you bad, too?”

Chilling. And effective, with 26.3 million viewers in its first week.

Similarly to the Franke docuseries, the last scenes of Unknown Number feature Lauryn Licari tearfully missing her mother, the same woman who made her high school experience a nightmare. Both endings suggest we may love a snapped mom story (Unknown Number was on the top 10 list of Netflix movies globally for six straight weeks), but no one, not even her daughter, knows what to do with a broken one.

Grace, Die My Love

Gradually progressing from Lifetime’s version of the Kendra Licari story starring Lisa Rinna to Jennifer Lawrence’s recently Golden Globe nominated role in Die My Love, the unhinged mom trope has evolved this year from perhaps overhyped but still shocking memoir, to true crimes, to big box office films. 

The shift from niche to ubiquitous tells us there is a demand for snapped mom stories propelled by more than just a fluke trend like vampires or witches. Outperformers in their genres, our morbid curiosity in moms-gone-bad points to a greater threat to American mothers.

After the #MeToo movement revealed the sheer number of sexual assault and harassment survivors, entertainment media responded with documentaries about famous abusers such as R. Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, and Larry Nassar, while movies like Bombshell and shows like The Morning Show fictionalized harassment stories. Similarly, after 2011-2020 was announced as the warmest decade on record, dystopian novels with climate crisis as their backdrop filled the shelves, Planet Earth’s newest installment amped up its call-to-action angle, and plenty of other climate change documentaries responded, too. These trends took off because they spoke to our fears on both a personal and universal level, pointing directly to a very real and present crisis. And so, shouldn’t this too?

It’s not just the rate of these stories; it’s the popularity of them. We are still finding ways to connect to the threat at the heart of these narratives, no matter how dark the scripts become. 

Linda, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You 

I was shaken by the way my mental health fell like a house of cards the morning of my unexpected panic attack, so when I recovered, I returned to therapy. One by one my mom friends are trying medication. “I don’t know a single mom who isn’t on an SSRI,” my sister said flippantly when I bemoaned my indecision about trying one myself. While I know she may be right, I resent that moms have to be medicated to survive. 

Just last week, while my husband was in the city for business for the night, I opted for self-medication after a day of high anxiety. I lovingly rushed the bedtime routine with my toddler (we still read three books and kissed all eleven of her crib stuffed animals good night) so I could greet my taco DoorDash and eat half an edible before saddling up to the couch to watch the newest A24 dramedy. The Chinese term for attempting to regain time lost during the day by staying up too late is called Baofuxing Aoye or “revenge bedtime procrastination.” I think we just call it self sabotage. Whatever you call it, it was the theme of my night and unwittingly the premise of the (more dark than comedy) dark comedy I was about to consume. 

In If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, we are introduced to Rose Byrne’s character who is, similarly to me, alone with her kid, momming, working, and dealing with a loose mental landscape. Of course, Rose’s hinges had become far more loosened than mine—her daughter is suffering from cancer, she’s displaced from her home, and her husband hasn’t been home for months. 

Still, as Byrne’s character Linda got high on her underwear drawer stash and binge ate cheese ripped from pizza slices, I ate nachos until my stomach hurt and regretted my edible. In the subtext of the film, I heard the message that echoed all year through entertainment media—could that be me? 

We’ve enjoyed a wrecked mom story for years, but today’s most popular snapped moms aren’t the cut-and-dry psychopaths of my cable TV youth, providing hope for those trying against all odds to be a good mom as in popular memoirs from the past like Maid, or letting loose on a night out like the Mila Kunis and Kristen Bell Bad Moms of yore. Today’s moms are crumbling, sometimes beyond redemption, but always after being presented as relatable. 

I’d been inspired to listen to the Motherload audiobook after my sister-in-law had texted earlier that day to say she managed to listen to 43 books in 2024, even though she has two toddlers. “I listen in one ear while doing housework. It makes me less frustrated about the division of labor in our house.”

Panic, loss of self, depression, marital issues—this is the reality behind the large audiences bad mommies bring in. Right now across the media landscape, characters in books, documentaries, and movies are mirroring something that statistics prove—trying to have it all sometimes looks like completely crashing down.

This month Oxygen announced a new Snapped series for 2026. The title?Killer Moms. If art imitates life, then the trajectory of this trend is showing us a disturbing reflection of our culture. Of course, moms watching don’t actually recognize that level of madness in themselves. But they fear it on a global level, and that fear drives us to consume it. How long can we hang on this way? And at what point will good entertainment fail to be enough of a cry for help?

---

Want our stories delivered to you? Sign up for our newsletter, then follow us on Instagram, Threads, and Facebook for regular updates and a lot of other silliness.