After an incident at their children's school, single mothers from different walks of life bond and create a support group to discuss their problems and how they can make them better for them and their children.
The Single Moms Club received negative reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has an approval rating of 19% based on reviews from 27 critics, with an average rating of 4.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "The Single Moms' Club finds Tyler Perry avoiding some of the pitfalls of his earlier work, but continuing to rely on heavy-handed melodrama at the expense of sensible characters or absorbing storylines." On Metacritic, the film has a score of 31 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews" from critics. Entertainment Weekly writer Chris Nashawaty rated the film a "C+" grade. He felt the female cast played "clichés cribbed from a booklet of screenwriting Mad Libs," and found Perry's filmmaking to be blunt and unsubtle with its "canned sentimentality, lazy stereotypes, and easy uplift." Jordan Hoffman of the New YorkDaily News gave credit to the Jan and Lytia pairing for having "a nice mix of comedy and genuine race/class tension", but criticized the other women for being "soap opera clichés" and the abandonment of the single-working-mother empowerment theme in favor of coincidental and ludicrous relationships, calling it "a film about catharsis and camaraderie, not logic." Alonso Duralde of TheWrap also found criticism in the movie's lazily-written, hard-working female characters and low entertainment value, saying "while it's frequently unintentionally hilarious, it's also crushingly dull." Stephen Schaefer of the Boston Herald saw the women as "one-dimensional" with superficial lives and contrived problems that come to an unearned conclusion, calling the film "a lackluster empowerment fantasy that veers between dull and embarrassing." Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of The A.V. Club gave the film a "D+" grade, commending Perry for delivering an "uncharacteristically low-key and charismatic" performance and backhandedly complimented him for creating "a conventionally well-made film", but said that "Perry's movies are rarely dull or repetitive. The Single Moms Club, meandering and schlock-free, is an exception in this regard." Sheila O'Malley from RogerEbert.com found the script's romantic relationships "slapdash" and clashing with the film's overall theme but commended Perry for handling the multiple storylines and the actresses for being "sympathetic and engaging", singling out Nia Long for being "emotionally accessible and funny" and bringing "a fresh and natural presence" to her role.
