Why Do Kids Need Awe? How Daily Wonder Supports Resilience, Learning, and Kindness
Last Tuesday, my 7-year-old Lila dragged me out the back door ten minutes after dinner, still in her mud-caked rain boots from after-school recess. I was half-way through stacking dishes and had a work email I needed to send before bed, so I kept one eye on the kitchen window while I followed her. She stopped ten feet from the porch, grabbed my wrist so hard her nails dug in, and pointed up at the dark sky. “Did you know there are more stars out here than every person in our whole city?” she said. I looked up. It was the first clear night all month, and the sky was thick with them, more than I ever noticed when I’m rushing from one thing to the next. I forgot about the email, forgot about the dishes, and for a minute we just stood there.
I’d listened to a new parenting podcast a few days before that talked about exactly this moment, and I hadn’t really connected the dots until that night. The episode brought on a child development researcher and a children’s media creator to talk about why kids need awe—why that feeling of being small next to something bigger than your daily worries matters way more than most of us think. I went in thinking awe was something you only get on a trip to the mountains or a fancy museum visit, something reserved for summer family vacations, not Tuesday nights after meatloaf. But both guests pushed back on that hard.
I work three days a week in a local preschool, so I thought of that rainy Friday in April when the playground flooded and we were stuck inside with 45 minutes to kill before pickup. I’d already pulled out every puzzle and craft bin, and I was this close to turning on a cartoon when one four-year-old pulled a cracked snail shell out of her pocket. She’d found it on the walk in that morning. Within a minute, every kid in the class was huddled around the reading rug, passing the shell around, whispering questions. No one was pushing, no one was crying over a broken crayon, no one was begging for screen time. They stayed there for almost 40 minutes, just looking and asking. I thought it was a lucky break that saved my afternoon. Now I see it was awe.
The researcher explained that when kids experience awe, their brain shifts out of its regular “to-do” mode. That pause is what makes it good for resilience. When you’re focused on how your friend wouldn’t play with you at recess, or how you messed up your math test, that small problem feels like the whole world. Awe pulls you out of that. It puts your problem in a bigger frame, so it doesn’t feel so overwhelming anymore. For learning, it’s even simpler: awe makes you curious. When you feel that little jolt of “how did that happen?” you want to learn more, not just because you have to for a grade. And when it comes to being kind to others, the researcher shared results from a small recent study that kids who had one unplanned awe moment a week were 20% more likely to share a snack or help a peer pick up dropped blocks than kids who didn’t. Shifting your focus off your own needs makes it easier to care about other people, that’s all.
The children’s media creator added that we fill almost all of kids’ empty time now, between structured after-school activities and screens that give instant answers to every question. There’s no room left for that pause. If a kid asks why clouds are shaped like that, we pull up a 2-minute video about cloud formation immediately instead of just standing there wondering with them. We don’t leave space for the feeling that makes awe matter, because we’re too busy turning it into a learning opportunity.
I’ve been testing small changes over the past two weeks, nothing fancy. Instead of rushing Lila along when she stops to look at something on our walk to the bus stop, I pause. It’s almost always just one or two minutes—enough to look at how the moss grows up the side of the old oak on the corner, or watch a line of ants carry a cookie crumb twice their size back to their hill. When she asks a question I don’t know the answer to, or even a question that sounds silly, I don’t jump to Google. I just say “that’s such a good question, it makes me stop and wonder too.” Last week, when she came home crying after a fight with her best friend, I didn’t sit her down to problem-solve right away like I usually do. I just said “want to go check if the dewdrops are still on the clover out back?” We stood there for ten minutes, not talking about the fight at all. After a while, she pointed to a dewdrop perched on a three-leaf clover and said “that looks like a tiny glass marble.” Five minutes after that, she told me what had happened. She calmed down way faster than she usually does after a fight. It worked better than any of my pre-planned “let’s talk about your feelings” talks.
It’s not perfect. Some days I’m running late for soccer practice, and I do hurry her along when she stops to look at a caterpillar on the fence. Some days I’m tired, and I just answer her question with a quick “I don’t know, let’s go” instead of pausing. I don’t think any of us can fit big awe moments into every day, and that’s not the point. The podcast didn’t say we need to rearrange our whole lives to add wonder. It just said we need to leave a little space for it, in the cracks of the ordinary days we already have. Last night, we stood out back again, looking for fireflies. We only saw three, and it was cold enough that we went back in after five minutes. But Lila pointed out one that flew right over our heads, and for that second, we both forgot about the homework that needed to be finished, and the dentist appointment the next morning, and all the small messy stuff that fills our days. It was enough.
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