Why Do Kids Need Awe? How Wonder Supports Learning, Resilience, and Kindness
I stared at my watch on our walk home from the park last month, tapping my foot as my 7-year-old froze mid-step, tilting her head at the weathered wooden fence separating the playground from the neighborhood. We had 12 minutes to get home, boil pasta, and grab her cleats for soccer practice, and she was stopping for a snail. “Look,” she said, pointing at the glistening trail it left behind. “It drew a silver line just for us. Did it know we’d walk by here?” I was 10 seconds from saying “C’mon, we’re late” when I paused, leaned in, and looked. I’d walked past that fence a hundred times and never noticed how the snail’s trail curved perfectly with the grain of the wood, how it caught the rain light like spun glass.
A few days later, I queued up a new education podcast I’d been meaning to listen to during my grocery run, and that’s exactly the topic they were discussing: why kids need awe, with a developmental researcher and a children’s media creator breaking down how quiet moments of wonder shape how kids learn, bounce back from stress, and treat the people around them. The researcher pushed back on the idea that awe is only for big, planned moments—family trips to the Grand Canyon, holiday fireworks, that kind of thing. For kids, she said, most awe is tiny, unplanned, the stuff we rush past every single day. It’s the feeling you get when you encounter something bigger than your normal routine, something you can’t immediately explain. It doesn’t have to be grand to matter.
That made me think of my job as a part-time preschool aide, and Javi, the new boy in my class last fall. He’d moved to town over the summer, and for the first two months, he was almost always in some kind of trouble: tussles on the playground, talking over everyone during circle time, knocking over blocks when he didn’t get his turn. We chalked it up to him adjusting to a new school and new town, and tried to give him extra attention, but nothing shifted much. One October morning, he showed up clutching a huge molted cicada shell in his palm, and refused to put it in his cubby. He insisted everyone in the class had to see it. Normally, we’d stick tight to our morning schedule, but our lead teacher nodded, and we passed the shell around for five whole minutes. Javi pointed out the tiny holes where the cicada’s legs had hooked in, how it felt like hard plastic but it was just an old bug’s leftover skin.
After that, Javi brought one small wonder every week: a pinecone that opened up on our windowsill, a piece of blue glass smoothed by the creek, a leaf with 12 points instead of the usual five. Other kids started bringing their own finds too. Within two months, the number of fights we broke up after circle time dropped by more than half. Javi started asking other kids what they’d found, instead of pushing them out of the way to get attention. I’d always just thought he finally settled in, but the podcast helped me connect the dots.
The researcher explained that most kids’ days are packed with small, constant stresses: rules to follow, schedules to keep, small conflicts with peers, pressure to come up with the right answer instead of asking questions. Awe pulls them out of their own small, tense headspace. When you’re wondering about a snail trail or a cicada shell, you’re not stressing about the kid who took your swing or the worksheet you got wrong. That’s how it builds resilience: you learn over and over that there’s more to your day than the hard parts.
The children’s media creator added that awe is where all learning starts. Kids don’t get excited about learning because we tell them they have to memorize a fact. They get excited because they saw something that made them go “what is that?” If we always rush past that moment, we teach them that the schedule is more important than their curiosity. She also talked about the link between awe and being kind to others: when you feel part of something bigger than your own wants and worries, you’re more likely to care about the people around you. That tracks perfectly with what I saw with Javi: once he had a way to share something he cared about with the whole class, he stopped seeing other kids as competitors for attention.
The best part of the conversation was that they didn’t ask parents or teachers to add one more big thing to our to-do lists. All the ideas they shared were small, low-effort, doable on busy days. There was the 2-minute rule: if your kid stops to look at something, even if you’re in a hurry, give them 2 full minutes to look and talk about it. You still get where you’re going, you just leave two minutes earlier next time, or make up the time somewhere else. Another idea was to pick one small “awe spot” along your daily walk to school or daycare, and stop for 30 seconds every day to check it out—whether that’s a dandelion growing through a sidewalk crack, a spider web between two fences, or an old tree with a knothole that looks like a face. And when your kid asks a weird, off-the-wall question, don’t just answer it or tell them to Google it later—spend 30 seconds wondering out loud with them first.
I’ve been trying these small things for a few weeks now. It doesn’t always happen. Last week, we were late for a dentist appointment, and my daughter stopped to watch a spider spin a web between two lampposts, and I just grabbed her hand and kept walking, promising we’d check it after the appointment. By the time we got back, the wind had blown the web away, and I felt guilty, but the researcher said it doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to happen more often than not.
This morning, we stopped at our awe spot on the way to the bus stop—the old oak with the knothole face—and we watched a flock of geese fly over in a loose V. My daughter said she thinks geese take turns leading because the front one has to work the hardest, and no one should have to do all the work alone. I know the real science is a little more complicated than that, but I didn’t say anything. I just nodded and watched them go. I don’t know if this will show up on her test scores or her report card next semester. Some days it feels like a waste of time we don’t have. But it makes the mornings feel slower, and she grins when we spot something new. That’s enough, for now.
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