You know your child best and at what ages are most appropriate to have certain conversations, and at what levels.) (With the caveat that each child is different.

I’m a big believer that there are age-appropriate ways to talk about hard things with kids - kids are aware of a lot more than people give them credit for. Reading the BooksĪs I was reading the books, I kept thinking about how I would approach this with my son, who will be 6 soon. I’d never read that book either, so I decided to read both, to deconstruct - maybe decolonize is the better word? - Wilder’s novel and come up with an approach that might be useful for learning with my son in the future. What I did note is that many times in response to various book lists, it was recommended to either switch out Little House for The Birchbark House, by Louise Erdrich, or read the books concurrently. I’d never read Laura Ingalls Wilder, so I didn’t understand the nostalgia for Little House when people would talk about it. I see homeschoolers debating this all the time on Instagram: should they read it, should they skip over parts, should they talk about the larger context and implications with their kids? There’s a lot to consider. She lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, with her husband and two children.Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder is one of those books that shows up on many, many children’s must-read book lists and children’s reading challenges, and at the same time, its place on these lists is also challenged because of its racist content. She is the illustrator of numerous titles in the Little House publishing program, as well as Rodgers and Hammerstein's My Favorite Things and E.T.A Hoffman's The Nutcracker, adapted by Janet Schulman. Renée Graef received her bachelor's degree in art from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Her writings live on into the twenty-first century as America’s quintessential pioneer story. The nine Little House books are international classics. After years of farming, Laura wrote the first of her beloved Little House books in 1932. The Wilders moved to Rocky Ridge Farm at Mansfield, Missouri, in 1894, where they established a permanent home. She married Almanzo Wilder in 1885 their only daughter, Rose, was born the following year. With her family, she pioneered throughout America’s heartland during the 1870s and 1880s, finally settling in Dakota Territory. Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957) was born in a log cabin in the Wisconsin woods.

My first little house books