Why Do Kids Need Awe? How Daily Wonder Supports Resilience, Learning and Kindness
The rain had just stopped when I pulled up to the elementary school pickup line last month, and my 8-year-old Lila bolted straight past the open car door to crouch by the curb. I sighed, checked my phone and saw I was already two minutes late to pick up my 12-year-old son from soccer practice, and followed her ready to hurry her along. She didn’t look up, just pointed at a palm-sized snail inching across a crack in the concrete, its shell streaked silver with rain. “Look how it carries its whole house everywhere,” she said. “Do you think it gets tired?”
I was 10 seconds from saying “That’s cool, let’s go” when I remembered the podcast I’d stayed up too late listening to the night before. A group of child development researchers and kids’ media creators were talking about why so many kids today miss out on regular experiences of awe, and how that small, quiet feeling shapes more than we think. I shut my mouth, leaned against the curb, and looked at the snail. We stood there for 90 seconds, until Lila was ready to leave. We got to soccer practice 4 minutes late, and the coach just waved. That small stop didn’t ruin our day, like I thought it would. It changed how I saw the rest of it.
For years I thought awe was the big stuff: standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, watching the Northern Lights, visiting a world-class museum. I don’t have the time or budget for trips like that every month, so I figured awe was just one more thing I was failing to give my kids. The podcast pushed back on that hard. The lead researcher on the show said her studies show that almost 80% of childhood awe moments happen in everyday places: a backyard, a sidewalk, a school playground. They don’t cost anything. Awe, they said, is just that feeling of being surprised by something bigger than you, something you can’t explain right away. It doesn’t have to be grand.
They talked through the research in plain terms: kids who feel awe regularly do better on open-ended problem-solving learning tasks, because they’re more comfortable with uncertainty instead of shutting down when they don’t know an answer right away. It builds resilience, because when you get used to stepping outside your own small worries to look at something that interests you, you can pull away from that bad test grade or awkward friendship fight faster. And kids who have these moments often are more likely to act kindly toward other people—they feel connected to something bigger than their own needs, so they’re more willing to share or help out.
That hit close to home. Last semester, Lila failed her first big math test and locked herself in her room for two hours, sobbing that she was “bad at everything” and would never get it right. That’s a common reaction for her; she gets stuck on small failures and can’t pull out of it. Three weeks ago, she messed up her opening line in a class debate, ran off the stage red-faced, and cried in my car for five minutes. Then she wiped her eyes and asked if we could stop at the duck pond on the way home—she’d seen a sign that the baby ducklings had hatched, and she wanted to see them before they got too big. We sat on the bench for 12 minutes, watching the fuzzy little ducklings chase each other through the reeds. By the time we got in the car to leave, she said “I can practice my opening more for the next one. It wasn’t that bad, anyway.” I hadn’t done anything but say “okay” to her request. That shift came from the ducklings.
After listening to the podcast, I started making three small changes that don’t add any extra time to my week, really. First, when my kids stop to stare at something, I don’t hurry them for at least a minute. If we’re really late, I say “we have to go in one minute, let’s look together until then” instead of pulling them away immediately. Second, I started a 60-second “wonder stop” once a week before dinner, where we walk around the block and each person points out one weird or cool thing they didn’t notice before. It started as just me and Lila, but my son started joining a month ago, and last week he pointed out how the telephone wires stretched into a perfect triangle against the orange sunset. Third, I don’t turn every wonder moment into a lesson. I used to jump in with facts about snails or duck migration when Lila pointed something out, but the creators on the podcast said that kills the feeling— awe is about wondering, not knowing the answer right away. Now I just say “that is so cool” or “huh, I never thought about that” and leave it there.
Teachers could adapt this easily too, they said on the podcast. Leave two minutes at the start of each day for kids to share one cool thing they saw outside of school, no facts required, just sharing. It takes no prep, and it sets a different tone for the whole day.
This isn’t a fix for every hard thing. Lila still has days where she gets stuck on bad grades, my son still snaps at me when he’s stressed about middle school drama. I still forget the one-minute rule all the time, when I’m juggling work deadlines and dinner and laundry. Last week I rushed my son away from a cool rainbow beetle he was looking at in the grocery store parking lot, and I felt guilty about it for an hour.
But when I do remember to slow down for those small moments, I see small shifts. Last week Lila brought an extra granola bar to school every day for a week, to give to the kid in her class who doesn’t always have a snack. She said she thought it would feel nice to have something good to eat if you were hungry, the same way it feels nice to watch the snail move slow. It’s not a big, dramatic change. It’s just a quiet difference, from making 60 extra seconds a week for something that doesn’t check a box on any to-do list. I still don’t know all the long-term effects of this small habit, but for right now, it feels like enough.
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