Let ‘Little House On The Prairie’ Wrap You In A Warm Blanket Of Nostalgia During This Dark, Confusing Moment

During the first week that schools were closed in New York City, with no curriculum to guide our three children and mass confusion being the rule, our family turned to Little House on the Prairie to pass the time. It was entertainment, it was educational, but beyond all that it filled some very necessary need we didn’t realize we had.

My husband and I had grown up with Little House on the Prairie, like other kids in the 1980s.

The series, based on Laura Ingalls Wilder’s best-selling children’s books and set in the late 1800s, tracks the life of the Ingalls family as they set out to make a life for themselves in Walnut Grove, Minnesota.

In our current dark, confusing moment, it was a warm blanket of nostalgia, taking us back to a time when someone else was in charge. We’re the parents now, but the show took us back to a time when someone else would make decisions for us while we zoned out in front of the television.

Writing in the New York Times, Amanda Hess described this kind of behavior —turning toward something that meant something to you in childhood— as regressing.

“We are entering Week 3 of social isolation, and I have regressed,” she writes. “The plush yellow duck of my youth has waddled out of storage and into my bed. Real pants are a distant memory. And all I want to do is play Myst, an immersive adventure computer game from the 1990s that I was obsessed with when I was 11.”

It’s not regression, exactly, to seek comfort in a time of trauma and stress. Much as recipe sites are currently focusing on comfort foods (like mac-n-cheese and pot pies), and every email from clothing retailers features the most comfortable attire they have in stock, so too is television pulling us towards the familiar and warm.

There’s also, hopefully, a feeling of safety in childhood. Little House on the Prairie activates our nostalgic synapses as we’re groping around for security. And fewer things induce those feelings of security more than the parental guidance of Charles, a rugged, loving, dependable man, and Caroline, a strong, capable woman taking care of their family on the prairie against all odds.

Bad things happen on the prairie, far worse than I remembered. In the first season, the Ingalls build and are forced to abandon their home, Charles gets injured and risks losing his job, and, worst of all, they lose a child, their first son. The show is not a mindless escape.

But then there’s the episode where an old lady wants to see her wandering children so she fakes her own funeral. The time the Ingalls set up the town’s classy mail lady with their gruff family friend, Mr. Edwards. Or the time the church needed a bell and it almost tore the town apart. There is the Oleson family, who own the mercantile and are horrible and full of themselves. The one room schoolhouse with the dedicated schoolmarm. There’s love and marriage, relationships and strife. There’s Charles Ingalls letting Laura keep a raccoon as a pet, for some reason, and the hijinks and dangers that ensue.

As we sit home, on our screens for better or worse, Little House provides a peek into a life before all our modern conveniences. Do we have it so bad, in our present moment, huddled into well-heated homes with dishwashers, refrigerators and indoor plumbing?

Not compared to the Ingalls. There’s a Christmas episode where Caroline finally gets a stove. Mary and Laura share a bed. A dictionary is the coveted prize in a school contest. The nearest big town to Walnut Grove is Mankato, Minnesota and traveling there was a long trip that necessitated a stay in a tent overnight on the way. In 1880, the population of Mankato was 5500, or the population of a few average city blocks.

Little House makes it easier to point out to our children, growing up in 2020, how much easier they have it than the children who came before them. We haven’t yet reached the episodes when typhus strikes Walnut Grove, or when Mary goes blind from Scarlet Fever (something we treat today with antibiotics, but a cure was still decades away for the Ingalls family).

The opening credits, with ma and pa on the covered wagon and the three girls running down a hill, evoke a carefree life even in the most difficult of times. Their times were harder than ours; watching the show is a great reality check on our lives right now. It will be ok. The Ingalls will get through their hard times and so will we.

Karol Markowicz (@Karol) is a freelance writer in Brooklyn. She enjoys only about 5% of movies she sees but 100% of Love & Hip Hop episodes.

Where to stream Little House On The Prairie