The Ingalls Family and Us

Bridging the gap and bringing back the timeless traditions of faith, home, and community

Watching "Little House on the Prairie," we might ask ourselves, "How central is family to my own life?" NBC Television/MovieStillsDB

In March 1974, “Little House on the Prairie” premiered on network television.

Based on the children’s books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, this dramatic series ran for nine years, garnered four Emmys and 16 nominations, and remains one of the most successful shows in the history of television. Despite its age, “Little House” remains popular with audiences today.

Much of that appeal doubtless has to do with the fine acting of Michael Landon as Pa Ingalls and Karen Grassle as Ma, and with Melissa Gilbert, Melissa Sue Anderson, and Rachel Lindsay Greenbush playing daughters Laura, Mary, and Carrie. Often loosely based on the novels, the storyline and dialogue are solid, and the cinematography and music attractive.

Many viewers are surely attracted as well by the virtues depicted in these frontier stories. They experience a nostalgia for a past they never lived, a time when life was simpler, or at least more basic, and the threads of a common morality ran through the fabric of the culture. They don’t necessarily yearn to return to that age with its backbreaking labor, its slow communications, or its pre-antibiotic illnesses, but they wish their lives more closely resembled those of Charles and Caroline Ingalls, their three girls, and some of the other characters on this show.

Here’s some good news for them: Work and words can make some wishes come true.

The Series Begins: A Quick Look

Following the full-length movie pilot, episode one of the “Little House” series finds the Ingalls family newly arrived on the banks of Plum Creek and ready to unpack their covered wagon. Charles finds work at a mill in the nearby town of Walnut Grove in exchange for lumber to build a house. Lacking a plow and seed, he takes another job as well with the flinty Mr. O’Neil. After breaking his ribs on a family picnic, Charles is unable to work, and O’Neil comes to collect the two oxen Charles had promised if he failed to complete the job. Some townsfolk come to Charles’s aid, finish up the work, and the Ingalls family is now free to plant their crop.

In that single episode are samples of all the gifts—a tight family, a place to call home, a supportive community—that so many long for today. But is it possible we can learn from “Little House” how to create those things and so make our wishes come true?

Let’s climb aboard our own covered wagon, travel back in time, and find out.

Family

When Charles realizes that by working so much he is neglecting his family and getting testy with the kids, he takes Caroline and the girls on a picnic. When he falls from a tree and breaks his ribs, Caroline plows the fields while the girls, who already do chores and watch little Carrie, take up the slack on cooking and household chores.

Here is a family that works together, provides their own entertainment—Pa’s fiddle, reading the Bible, and storytelling—and pitches in when the going gets tough. In the pilot show, Charles at one point says he never should have taken Caroline away from her family in Minnesota. “My family is where you are,” says Caroline, echoing Ruth from scripture: “Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay.”

Today, that emphasis on family has gone missing. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that while a large number of parents prioritize their children’s education and career satisfaction, only about 20 percent teach their children that marriage and family are important in life.

Watching this episode, we might then ask ourselves: How central is family to my own life?

If we have no family under our roof, then we might ask: Is there a way I might better my connections with my family members, or reestablish a relationship with a fallen-away relative?

The tight-knit Ingalls family embodied a can-do self-reliant attitude. NBC Television/MovieStillsDB

Home

Lying in bed in the loft built for them by their father, Laura says, “I think home is the nicest word there is.”

Laura’s right. The word home has magic in it, as does a home itself. For many of us, home is a memory box, a collection of treasures, each of which reminds us of who we are and where we’ve been. There’s the secretary with its pull-down desk owned by our great-grandmother, the dollhouse played with by our daughters when they were in kindergarten, the bookshelf built by our father, the desk given us by our spouse when we were first married.

In the pilot, the Ingalls lived in a sod hut, and in the first episode, they live for a time in a house dug into the side of a hill. Both places were home to them because they made them so, and the same is true for us. Whether our address is an apartment in Chicago or a luxury home in Newport, Rhode Island, where we live is home if we fill it with love, treasured objects, and memories.

Karen Grassle as Caroline Ingalls and Michael Landon as Charles Ingalls. NBC Television/MovieStillsDB

Friends and Community

When Charles with his broken ribs staggers to work for Mr. O’Neil so as to complete his contract and regain his oxen, he soon collapses lifting heavy bags of grain. Though he is new to town, people have come to respect Charles as a hard worker and an honest man, and some of them now step up and finish the job for him. At episode’s end, our narrator Laura tells us, “Pa said he was glad we had come to live on the banks of Plum Creek because here he harvested a crop he didn’t know he’d planted: a harvest of friends.”

That such a community was more easily achieved in that age than now is a truism. People rubbed elbows shopping in the same stores, entertaining themselves at dances, attending the same church, and helping one another, if for no other reason than it was the neighborly thing to do.

Our task is more difficult. Our modern ways—our cars, televisions and computers, jobs and busy schedules, and more—put us a long way from the small towns and villages of the 1880s, or even from the neighborhoods of the large cities of that time. We simply don’t know one another as they did. In my own neighborhood, for example, though nearly every house has a front porch, most people either stay inside or sit on decks overlooking their backyards. When I’m on my porch, I wave to passersby in their cars, but I don’t know their names or a thing about them.

It’s Up to Us

If we want the things we see in “Little House on the Prairie”—the tightknit family, a house transformed into a home, neighbors and friends we know and trust—we have to work for them. If we wish to strengthen our families, we may have to give up overachieving at the office and spend more time with our spouse and children. If Caroline Ingalls can sweep the dirt floor of a sod house, put out a few treasured items brought from Minnesota, and call the place home, we can surely make our own homes worthy of that same name. And while creating or finding a community is difficult, there are plenty of ways to begin: joining a church or some local organization, learning the name of the clerk who rings up our groceries, and treating those we encounter as we wish to be treated.

We have luxuries those recent ancestors could scarcely have imagined: temperature-controlled vehicles that can cross Kansas in hours rather than in days, health care that prevents so many of the diseases and deaths of that age, the ability to hold a device in the palm of our hand and communicate with the world.

But they possessed some things our culture is lacking. By adopting their can-do, self-reliant attitude, we can, if we wish, strengthen those old-time essentials of family, home, and community.