Why Do Kids Need Awe? How Everyday Wonder Shapes Resilience and Learning
My sneakers scuffed the wet sidewalk last Tuesday, 10 minutes behind schedule for school, my work calendar open on my phone buzzing with a last-minute meeting reminder. My 7-year-old, Lila, was three steps behind me, then gone. I turned around, already opening my mouth to hurry her along, and found her flat on her stomach, chin propped on her hands, staring at a palm-sized snail inching its way across a crack in the concrete.
“Mom, look how it carries its whole house with it,” she said, not looking up. “Do you think it gets tired?”
I checked the time. We were already going to miss the first bell. I told her we’d look on the way home, held out my hand, and she got up, brushing grass off her jeans, still glancing over her shoulder the whole way to school. That night, I was folding laundry while catching up on a kid development podcast, and that’s exactly what the whole episode was about: why kids need awe, and what happens when we rush past those small, stop-staring moments over and over. Researchers and children’s media creators were on the episode talking through how that quiet feeling of wonder shapes how kids handle hard things, how they learn, and how they treat the people around them.
I went into the episode thinking awe was just for big, planned moments—trips to the Grand Canyon, fancy science museums, camping trips under the stars. That it’s a nice extra we can fit in if we have the time and money after homework, soccer practice, and birthday parties. But the people on the episode pushed back on that. Awe, they said, is just the feeling you get when you encounter something that doesn’t fit your usual daily routine. It can be a snail on a sidewalk. It can be the way frost patterns look on a car window. It can be a caterpillar turning into a chrysalis on a milkweed plant in the park.
I thought about Lila’s homework last month, when her teacher swapped the traditional 20-minute nightly reading log for a “wonder journal.” The only requirement: write down one thing you wondered about each day. I thought it was just a cute, low-stakes assignment to get kids writing over the spring. Lila’s entries were all over the place: why do dandelions turn fluffy? why does my cat like to sleep in the sink better than her own bed? why does the wind sound different at night than during the day? After listening to the podcast, I realized what her teacher was doing. She wasn’t just skipping reading log busywork. She was building the habit of stopping to notice, which makes learning feel less like checking boxes and more like exploring. Kids who are used to wondering ask more questions, stick with hard problems longer, and remember what they learn better than kids who are only taught to give the right answer as fast as possible.
The researcher on the podcast explained that when kids feel awe, it slows their brain down. Most of the time, we’re all running on task mode—get to school, finish the worksheet, get to practice, get home, eat dinner, go to bed. When that’s all we do, our brains get stuck on small, immediate problems: I messed up this quiz, my friend didn’t sit with me at lunch, I fell off my bike. Awe pulls you out of that tight headspace. It makes your own problems feel a little smaller, not in a bad way, just in a way that lets you breathe. That’s how it builds resilience, the researcher said. It doesn’t make hard things go away, but it keeps one small problem from taking over your whole day.
I tested that a few days after I listened to the episode. Lila was practicing riding her bike no hands, and she fell hard on the edge of the soccer field, scraping her knee raw. She sat in the grass crying, saying she was never going to try again, that she was bad at biking, that she’d never be able to do it like her friends. Normally I’d have knelt down, cleaned her knee, and told her she just needed to try again. That day, I glanced up and saw a bright, sharp rainbow stretching over the tree line at the end of the field, leftover from the 10-minute rainshower we’d just had. I nodded toward it and said, “Look how bright that purple stripe is. I almost never see purple that clear in a rainbow.”
She stopped crying mid-sob, turned her head, and stared for a minute. “It’s even pink in one spot,” she said. We stood there for two minutes watching it fade. Then she wiped her face on her sleeve, got back on her bike, and said she wanted to try again. It didn’t fix her scraped knee, and she fell two more times that afternoon. But that small moment of wonder pulled her out of the spiral of frustration faster than any of my pep talks ever have.
The podcast also talked about how wonder shapes how kids treat other people. When you’re in the habit of stopping to notice things outside your own to-do list, you notice other people more, too. The children’s media creator on the episode said she’s seen that with her own kids: after they spend an hour looking at tide pool creatures on a day trip, her kids are more likely to stop and help a younger kid carry their bucket, more likely to share their snack without being asked. That shift from focusing only on your own goals to noticing the world around you is what builds that kind of thoughtful, kind behavior.
None of this requires big changes, or big plans, or extra money. The people on the episode had small, doable things anyone can try: add two extra minutes to your morning walk to school so you don’t have to rush past whatever catches your kid’s eye. When your kid asks you a “why” question about something random, instead of pulling out Google to give them the answer right away, say “that’s such a good question, what do you think?” Add one 5-minute round of “what did you wonder about today” to your dinner table, no right or wrong answers allowed.
I still rush most days. On that Tuesday with the snail, when we walked back to school after dismissal, the snail was gone. Lila stood there for a minute looking at the empty crack, and I apologized for rushing her. We stopped to look at three different spider webs strung between the oak trees on the way home, and counted how many dewdrops were caught in each. I still forget to stop more often than I remember. I haven’t planned a big awe-themed trip or anything. Most of our wonder moments are 2 minutes here, 5 minutes there, small things that don’t make it to the photo album. But lately, I’ve noticed that when I do slow down enough to join Lila in staring, the whole day feels a little looser, a little more interesting, for both of us.
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