Why Do Kids Need Awe? What Research Says About Wonder For Child Resilience, Learning and Behavior
Last Tuesday, I was standing at the kitchen counter, chopping zucchini for lasagna, scrolling my grocery list on my phone to make sure I didn’t forget garlic bread, when my 7-year-old Lila tugged my sleeve three times. “Mom. Come look. Now.” I sighed, wiped zucchini pulp off my apron, and followed her to the front window. It had just stopped raining, and the sidewalk below our porch was dotted with slugs, inching their way toward the hosta bed. Lila pointed at the silvery trails crisscrossing the concrete. “They’re drawing maps for the other slugs,” she said. “Did you know that?” A month ago, I would have nodded, told her that was cool, and herded her back to set the table. I had a schedule to keep. But the night before, I’d listened to a new podcast episode where researchers and children’s media creators talked about why so many kids are missing out on daily awe, and what that does to their development. So I leaned against the window sill next to her, and we watched slugs for three minutes.
I’d been looking for answers lately, anyway. For the past few months I’d noticed small shifts in Lila that worried me. She’d come home crying every other week because she’d messed up a worksheet or her soccer team lost a scrimmage, and she couldn’t shake the bad mood. She’d stopped talking to the new girl in her class, the one who moved here over the summer, because Lila said she “didn’t have time to show her around” when she already had her best friend. I’d read all the small parenting bits about building resilience and kindness, but none of it felt doable on a Tuesday night when I was already tired and behind on laundry.
The podcast didn’t frame awe as this big, fancy thing you have to plan a vacation to get. The researcher explained that awe is just any feeling you get when you encounter something bigger than your usual daily concerns. For kids, that’s almost never the Grand Canyon. It’s a slug’s silver trail. It’s a spiderweb covered in dew. It’s the way light hits dust motes dancing in a sunbeam. What their research found lines up with what I’ve started to notice: when kids experience that feeling regularly, their brains don’t stay stuck on small, stressful problems. That’s how it supports resilience: if you’ve just stopped and looked at something that makes you go “huh,” that smudged art project doesn’t feel like the end of the world anymore. For learning, it makes sense—kids hold onto what they wondered about far more than what they were told to memorize. And for connecting to other people? When you’re not wrapped up in your own small worries, you’re more likely to notice someone else who needs a friend.
After I listened, I decided to try two small changes, nothing that required extra time or money. First, I added three extra minutes to our morning walk to school. We used to run the whole way, me checking work emails, Lila complaining she was tired. Now, we have a simple rule: we stop once, for whatever catches our eye. No agenda. If it’s a weird shaped cloud, we stop. If it’s an anthill that looks like a tiny castle, we stop. Second, we swapped the 2 minutes of scrolling I did while we wait for dinner to cool for a quick round of “what did you wonder today?” Each person says one thing they saw that felt cool or weird, no long explanations required.
It’s only been a month, but small shifts are already visible. Last month, Lila’s whole science fair project collapsed when her jar of bean sprouts tipped over the night before it was due. Two years ago, she would have crumpled on the floor crying, saying she was stupid and she wasn’t going to school the next day. This time, she wiped her eyes on her sleeve, and said “Can we go look at the moon first? I wanted to see the new crater the astronaut talked about on NASA Kids.” We dragged the old telescope out onto the porch, stood there in the cold for 12 minutes, until we found it. When we came back in, she decided to redo her project around why her sprouts fell over—she’d taped the wrong side of the jar, that’s why it tipped. She ended up getting honorable mention. A week after that, she invited the new girl from class over to look for caterpillars on the milkweed we planted out back. She said they both wondered if the caterpillars would be fat enough to make cocoons before winter.
I used to think stopping for these small moments was a waste of time. I had a to-do list a mile long, and pausing to look at slugs felt like I was falling behind. But three minutes is nothing. It doesn’t make me miss my meeting, it doesn’t ruin dinner (well, okay, I burned the garlic bread last week when we stopped to watch a fox walk through the backyard, but that’s a small price). The podcast creators said something that stuck with me: adults are the ones who train kids to stop seeing wonder. We teach them to rush, to get from point A to point B, to only care about the stuff that’s on the test or the scoreboard. Kids are already wired to find awe everywhere—we just have to not push them past it. You don’t even have to know what the thing is. I don’t actually know why slugs leave silver trails. Lila still thinks they’re drawing maps, and that’s fine. I don’t have to turn it into a science lesson to make it count. The feeling is the point.
It’s still early, so I don’t have any big grand conclusions. Lila still has meltdowns when she can’t figure out her math homework. She still fights with her little brother over who gets the blue cup. But I notice she talks more about other kids now, not just her own problems. I notice when she’s stuck on something hard, she’ll take a minute to look out the window instead of immediately giving up. Most of our awe moments are tiny, unplanned, and completely free. We don’t need to go to the mountains or the museum to get it. We just need to stop, every once in a while, and look at the slugs. Some days that feels like enough.
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