With Netflix’s reimagining of Little House on the Prairie now streaming, there may be a spike in the overall discourse about “trad wives,” a social media trend and way of life that mimics parts of the lifestyle portrayed in the show.
A tradwife generally refers to a woman who takes on what has long been seen as a “traditional” role of women in a marriage, household and family. Oftentimes in the discussion of the recent label, magnified by social media (examples include the Instagram account @ballerinafarm run by Hannah Neeleman), Little House on the Prairie is used as a reference point for the simpler, homemaker life led by women in those times.
Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear, published in April 2026, as well as other books like Jo Piazza’s Everyone Is Lying To You, which came out July 2025, have added a modern bookish angle to the discussion around the category.
When asked about that framework or context and how it connects to her reimagining of Laura Ingalls’ Wilder’s source material, showrunner of the Netflix adaptation Rebecca Sonnenshine said she thinks about it a lot.
“I don’t really know much about trad wife influencers and culture because it’s just not my beat, but I do think it’s interesting that people like to claim things. My mom was a working professional. She was a teacher, and yet she was an artist, a sculptor and a painter, but she loved expressing herself through domestic arts, and so did my father,” Sonnenshine told Deadline. “He loved to build things, he loved to garden, he loved to make things with his hands. My mother loved to sew. She sewed my clothes. I would draw things, and then she would embroider those things that I drew onto my clothes. Part of her artistic expression of life was baking and sewing and cooking and gardening. Those things don’t belong to anyone.”
Sonnenshine stressed that another root of these activities for her family was the intention of giving to others. It can be a hobby or something in which working professionals, executives and showrunners like herself engage.
“I, myself, am not a trad wife, and I’m a really good embroiderer. I can make really good peach jam. For Christmas, all my family, we give each other homemade gifts. They are working professional ladies and men. I like to sew, I like to knit, I like to bake. Those things don’t get to be claimed by somebody,” she continued. “All those things are an artistic expression of love because you make them for other people. The interesting thing about this influencer culture is you’re just making it to show other people that you’re keeping it for yourself.
“I do those things to give away and to make for other people, like so many people do. So many people love to share the things that they make, because it’s an expression of love, it’s an expression of themselves,” she added. “That’s really what people should be taking away from this, not that it’s something that is exclusive to a person who stays home and doesn’t work and cares for children and makes a beautiful home. It’s not something that belongs to one type of person.”
When it comes to Pa’s role in the series as builder of the house and furniture and overall what Luke Bracey described to Deadline as “a good man”, Sonnenshine cited both her parents as an example she drew from for the character of Charles Ingalls and how he provided for his family with the help of his wife. She has previously expressed the expansiveness of gender roles in the show and how she wanted to shift perceptions of them.
“It was tough. My dad was really into building things. He built a geodesic dome with my mom. It was just the two of them, and so I saw them working side by side, which always reminded me [of Little House],” she said.“When I was reading these books was when they were doing that. It seemed totally normal to me that my mom would pitch in with big projects and construction stuff, and they would just do things together. Lots of men in my life express themselves through interesting projects with food and gardening.”
The risk of Pa’s daring endeavor to head out west with his wife and daughters was a reality Sonnenshine wanted to capture in the show.
“The spirit of the books is very optimistic, like, ‘Oh, Ma dropped a log on her foot, but it was fine,’ and ‘We almost drowned the river, but it was fine, it was no big deal.’ They gloss over things, and so there’s this real question when you adapt something like this, ‘How dark do you want to make it?’” she said. “Obviously, we know what the reality was. It was very, very hard, and yet the books really celebrate this idea of seeing the magic in things and seeing the hope in things, and so it’s a real balancing act while trying to illuminate how hard it was sometimes. It was dangerous, it was a great leap into the unknown, and yet [the challenge was] not be cynical about it, and not go too dark with it.
The showrunner added: “It’s a little scary, and we’re nodding to that scariness and that grittiness, yet if we went, all American primeval, that would not be capturing the spirit of the books, that is not what the books are. The books are about the wonders of everything, even adversity. It’s about the wonders you find within adversity and hard times and resilience and hope, and so that’s what I’m trying to balance and capture with this series.”
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