Reorienting ourselves toward awe: Q&A with Deborah Farmer Kris

and how making a point to "look up" can nurture our sense of wonder

The other day, when I ventured out for a walk in the woods behind our house, I found that it was rougher going than I’d expected. The trails have become harder to navigate as spring has taken hold: the wild rose and blackberry plants have exploded, leaving little thorny tendrils strewn across paths; there’s been a lot of rain lately, so those same trails are also muddy, and high winds a few weeks back had further littered the ground with blown-down branches and tree limbs.

So as I walked I spend a lot of time looking down: carefully squelching through muddy spots, shoving thorny vines out the way with the toe of my rubber boot, and occasionally bending down to dislodge a larger branch.

Then, coming around a bend, I happened to look up - and saw this:

The sight brought me to a sudden, breath-catching, mouth-gaping halt.

I’m not exactly sure why: there’s nothing all that surprising about a bunch of wildflowers in May, after all. But something about the unexpectedness of all that color in the middle of the forest, and the sun streaming down through the trees, caught me. I stood and stared, my heart beating a little faster, my spirit feeling lighter.

It was a small thing, but no doubt about it: in that moment, I was experiencing awe.

I thought about that little moment of wonder as I was getting the following interview with

Deborah Farmer Kris

ready to publish, thinking about all the metaphors for life tangled up in that moment in the woods: how we’re often so busy “looking down” at the ground in front of us, trying to keep our path (and our kids’ paths) clear of obstructions and tripping hazards, forgetting to look up and out and see the wonder of the world around us.

And it’s tempting to try to pass that trudging, risk-averse, achievement-oriented worldview on to our kids, too, instead of leaning into their natural orientation toward awe and wonder. What possibilities do we squelch when we do that?

Maybe, instead, the answer is to reorient ourselves toward awe by seeking out more opportunities to “look up.”

Deborah’s brand-new book, Raising Awe Seekers: How The Science of Wonder Helps Our Kids Thrive, releases today. In this Q&A, Deborah shares more about why she decided to delve deeply into the science of awe, how parents can re-orient themselves toward awe to open up opportunities to share it with their kids, and why cultivating a sense of wonder is so crucial for kids and adults alike.

Q&A with Deborah Farmer Kris, author of Raising Awe Seekers

MF: In your book you talk about a pivotal post-pandemic moment in which you were asked to speak on stress and resilience, and instead decided you want to talk about hope. How are wonder and awe intertwined with hope?

DFK: A school called and asked me to give a parenting talk about stress and resilience, and something inside me just snapped. I was gritted-out. We all were, right? We were so tired of muscling through “these unprecedented times.”

My writing motto for over a decade has been “tell the story of hope,” and I think I realized I needed a new way to tell that story. So when I stumbled upon the research on awe and wonder, I felt such a spark – like it was reconnecting me to something profoundly human and hopeful. And there was SCIENCE behind this emotion. On a certain level, studying awe gave me hope. Because awe is found in the ordinary. It’s in the sunrise and a your neighbor’s new puppy and a song that gives you goosebumps.

But more specifically – I had a chance to interview hope researcher and Stanford psychologist Jamil Zaki for this book. Zaki described optimism as a belief that the world will be better and cynicism as the belief that it will never be better. But hope, he said, is the conviction that the world can be better. The future “can be better,” because humans can do something to make it so. Your kids can make a difference.

Which brings me back to awe. It turns out that the most common elicitor of awe is noticing human goodness. When we see people being kind and brave, we get those goosebumps. Zaki told me that his college students’ anxiety stems from “the perception that the world is struggling and I can’t do anything about it.” But when we share stories with our kids and teens about people doing something about it – making their neighborhoods and communities better in small and large ways – we fuel their sense of purpose and possibility.

And yeah, we need that right now. So I try to tell my kids lots of stories about good people doing small, good things in this messy world.

MF: So much of the conversation around parenting today is focused on outcomes (like achievement) and prevention (getting "in front of" potential dangers). Frankly, it can be kind of a bummer. Where is the missed opportunity here and how can parents rediscover the joy of having children?

DFK: Phew! I avoid the word “success” at almost all costs. And honestly, that’s tricky when you are a parenting writer in this culture. But I do love this acronym from Stanford University’s Challenge Success: PDF. That’s their shorthand for three things that support our kids’ wellbeing.

P: Playtime

D: Downtime

F: Family time

And all three of these things open up opportunities for awe. Because they all require slowing down. When I interviewed Dr. Dacher Keltner – the preeminent awe researcher – he told me that when parents talk about awe, they rarely talk about big moments of achievement. They talk about stargazing with their kids . . . or watching their face light when they learn something new . . . or lingering in the doorway after they fall asleep and watching them breathe. Then he said this, and honestly it’s my favorite quote in the whole book:

How do you find awe? You allow unstructured time. How do you find awe? You wander. You drift through. You take a walk with no aim. How do you find awe? You slow things down. You allow for mystery and open questions rather than test-driven answers. You allow people to engage in the humanities of dance and visual art and music.

MF: Sometimes things that come very naturally to children, like wonder and awe, can feel a lot less natural for parents, which can lead to us accidentally squelching it. Which is too bad! How can parents reorient themselves toward awe?

DFK: So the average four-year-old asks somewhere between 70 and 100 questions a day. Which makes total sense if you’ve raised a four-year-old. So many of these questions are Why? or How? questions – this is how they figure out the world. Here’s what my daily questions sound like: Where are my keys? Why hasn’t anyone unloaded the dishwasher? Who’s picking you up from school? What did the dog just eat?

Writing this book has put me on such a journey of – as you put it – reorienting myself toward awe. And that’s involved tuning into the part of myself that isn’t a mom! As I wrote about each of the sources of awe, I started to ask myself – what is it about art, music, nature, community, etc. that lights me up? What brings me those goosebump moments?

There’s this great scene in the movie Runaway Bride where Richard Gere asks Julia Roberts how she likes her eggs. And she realized she doesn’t know! She has “liked” them however each of her successive fiances has liked their eggs. There’s a definite motherhood metaphor in that.

There was this point when my kids were about 8 and 11 when I realized I didn’t know what music I liked anymore. I had spent so many years in the car listening to my kids’ music, and when I started to relisten to my old favorites, they just didn’t hit in the same way. I had this despairing moment where I just felt like I had lost a part of myself and didn’t know where to find it.

But around the same time, my oldest child had just gotten a Spotify account because she wanted to figure out her musical tastes, too. And she taught me how to use it and gave me suggestions of songs she thought I might like. It’s been an unexpectedly fun discovery process.

So that’s my advice – to myself and your audience. Tune in to what makes you smile, lights up your eyes, and gives you goosebumps. And don’t be surprised if that is a process of rediscovery as you get older. This is especially important as your kids get older and fly away. I think one of the great gifts we can give our older kids is seeing mom as a person with interests, hobbies, and joys that have nothing to do with them! That gives them a healthy model of what it means to live a full life.

MF: I'd love to talk about how "awe" isn't just something you share with your preschooler when they're newly discovering the world. How can we continue to have conversations with our kids as they enter the teen years and beyond that foster a sense of awe and encourage them to be lifelong awe-seekers? And just as importantly, how can we discover and nurture that sense of awe in ourselves?

DFK: I am almost more interested in wonder for our teenagers than I am for little ones. Part of this is because of the benefits of awe – reduced stress and internal chatter, intellectual curiosity, mental and emotional wellness, social connectivity – are so key to teens’ wellbeing.

I think this is the best thing we can do to foster their wonder: tune in to what lights them up. And it will change. A lot. Be radically curious about their curiosities. That’s a gift my dad gave me. He was not a “natural” parent. He was overwhelmed a lot by the demands of work and family. Talking about feelings? Forget it. But wonder? He was the most curious person I’ve ever met. As I wrote in a recent substack, my dad had a beautiful mind. Professionally, he was a genetics professor. On the side, he was fascinated by ancient Greek, Shakespeare, theology, and electronics. He had a huge stack of Scientific Americans by his chair, which he flipped through while watching Dr. Who, MASH, or Masterpiece Theater. He sang bass in the choir, wrote to Congress about the hazards of missile testing, and listened to “Live From the Metropolitan Opera” every Saturday while working on home repairs.

But here’s the thing, he made my wonders his wonders. When I declared I wanted to be a geologist at age 9, he took me to Caltech (his alma mater) to introduce me to a geology professor. When I wanted to be an anthropologist in middle school, he bought me a Margaret Mead book. When I wanted to be a journalist in high school, he felt me newspaper clippings almost daily of stories he thought I’d like. When I decided to become a teacher, he embraced that, too. He gave my nature-loving brother topographical maps to plan and lead hiking trips to remote parts of southern Utah.

In other words, just by caring about what I cared about – even if it wasn’t his own passion – he gave me permission to pursue wonder. He gave me space to be an awe-seeker. That’s what I hope to do with my kids, too.

Deborah Farmer Kris is a child development expert and the author of "Raising Awe-Seekers: How the Science of Wonder Helps Our Kids Thrive,” the I See You board book series, and the All the Time picture book series. Deborah is currently an expert advisor for the PBS KIDS show, “Carl the Collector,” and spent 20+ years as a K-12 educator.

Thanks so much to Deborah for sharing some time with us during her very busy book release week. Look for Raising Awe Seekers at your local bookstore today (and ask your library to carry it, too!)

And I’d love to hear from you: when is the last time you experienced awe - even if it was just a small, unexpected moment of “looking up”?

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