The Breakfast Club was released 40 years ago. I wasn’t even born when the movie came out, but as a teen in the early-aughts, the John Hughes classic absolutely resonated with me. To see five teens explain so perfectly what it felt like to be a certain personality all the time, to have to fight their own wants and desires because that’s not what society dictated for them, to prove over and over their own worth to people who are supposed to love and care for them — The Breakfast Club just got it.
I’m so grateful I watched it as a teen, when my own life felt both exciting and spiraling… when I was desperate to fit in but also wanted to be myself. I will never, ever forget the chills I got when Brian’s voiceover read the essay at the end of the film, telling Vernon and the movie viewers that each of us is a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. Hell yeah, we are. What are we all doing pretending like we aren’t?
But rewatching it as an adult with my three girls, there’s something deeply sad about the movie that I didn’t catch the first time. Sixteen-year-old me related to the students and their woes, pressures, and fears. Thirty-six-year-old me? She’s just desperate to make sure her girls never feel an ounce of the sadness and worry that The Breakfast Club felt.
At the end of the day, The Breakfast Club is a parenting guideline, a warning about what happens when you don’t give a sh*t about your kids. Of course, some of it is blown out of proportion (most of us know the difference between encouraging your kid to be a better person and putting out cigars on their bare skin), but watching The Breakfast Club as a parent just makes you realize how desperate these kids want to be loved by the people who are supposed to. And that success and popularity and reputations only go so far — they can’t replace feeling like you really truly belong and are loved by your family.
I do think society as a whole has changed a good deal since The Breakfast Club. Being the “weird” kid isn’t quite the nail-in-the-coffin it used to be for popularity. Being unashamed of your girlhood, of your interests, of your friends: It’s all on trend (although still not perfect). Maybe if The Breakfast Club had a different high school, with peers from the 2020s who thought it was OK to be different, their home lives and terrible parents wouldn’t have affected them so much. Although then they would’ve had social media, and oh boy, what a mess.
But The Breakfast Club shows that so much of what our kids go through is tied to their home life. It’s why we’re all so adamant about creating a cozy, secure place for them here. It’s why we hear about kids holding it together all day at school and then losing their minds once they’re home. They’re safe here. They know they’re loved; they know they’ll be forgiven.
And they know that as long as they try their best, it’s always going to be enough.
The Breakfast Club almost romanticized teen angst, and I think it was so important then. Honestly, it’s still important. The Breakfast Club is the ultimate movie for teens and tweens to watch because it’s highly relatable. There’s something so comforting about seeing people who look like you and your peers struggle.
But watching it as a mom gave me a whole new outlook on parenting and raising my girls. Doing right by them sometimes means doing the thing you don’t want to do: backing off, giving them space, letting them work things out for themselves. Sometimes, when we think we’re doing our best, we’re doing our worst. When we think we’re protecting them and saving them from some mythical situation that hasn’t happened yet, maybe we’re really setting them up to feel pressured and trapped.
And maybe we just need to remember that screws fall out all the time — the world’s an imperfect place.