The birth of my grandchild was a moment of awe and full of emotion. I was present during the ultrasound scan and I saw this wonderful tiny human being. Even though I am a mother of six children, I lived this moment with awe. I was moved, full of joy, I cried as for the birth of my children. I left the maternity ward overexcited, I wanted to shout my joy to the whole world and was overwhelmed at the same time. These moments were very rich in emotion.
We are the only primate species in which women live significantly beyond the age of menopause. This shift in life expectancy over the history of our species ensured that grandmothers, experts in giving birth and raising offspring, lived long enough to share their wisdom and physical talents with young women having children at the average age of nineteen years or so in hunter-gatherer times and more recently in our history. The vulnerability of our offspring requires intensive care from many quarters, including aging grandparents, who hopefully find new forms of awe in this next wave of loving support for children.
The wonders and horrors of childbirth led Nancy Bardacke to a remarkable career in promoting more awe-filled births. Bardacke was transformed in the late 1960s by the natural childbirth work of Fernand Lamaze. At that time, U.S. culture had overmedicalized childbirth, so much so that laboring women were often drugged to full unconsciousness while giving birth. They often didn’t recognize their new babies upon first seeing them. Nancy worked as a midwife, and then created a mindful birthing program that has brought thousands of humans into the world. She has seen it all, from placing a neonate she knew was soon to die in the arms of his parents, to thousands of high vagal, oxytocin-rich births. When we spoke, she described her work as follows.
The birth . . .
You see the head crown, and then the eyes and face slowly appear. WOW. Each time I don’t believe that the baby will come out. And each time it does. It is a miracle. It is a privilege to witness life become.
My work is like a child . . . it didn’t belong to me . . . it came through me . . .
Birth and death are metaphors for everything.
Breathe in, I am here.
Breathe out, I expire.
WONDER!
In the right circumstances, childbirth is the very beginning of years of exploration of the eight wonders of life. The way in which we play introduces children to wonders of different kinds—moving in unison in dance, camping, music, painting and drawing wild forms, and discovering sacred geometries. Childhoods rich with awe are good for the child. In one illustrative study, five-year-olds who watched an awe-inspiring nature video, compared to children in a control condition, were more imaginative in how they played with a new toy and chose smaller circles—another way to measure the small self—to describe themselves. My collaborators Dante Dixson, a professor at Michigan State University; Craig Anderson; and I have found that as children develop, regular feelings of awe animate their curiosity in school and predict better academic performance for students in underresourced neighborhoods.
One of the most alarming trends in the lives of children today is the disappearance of awe. We are not giving them enough opportunities to discover and experience the wonders of life. Art and music classes do not make the school budget. The free-form play of recess and lunchtime is being replaced with drills to boost scores on tests that have only modest relation to how well kids do in school. Teachers must teach to those tests rather than engage students in open-ended questioning and discovery, where the unknown is the centerpiece of the lesson. Every minute is scheduled. And the natural world children are experiencing is undergoing mass extinctions. It’s no wonder that stress, anxiety, depression, shame, eating disorders, and self-harm are on the rise for young people. They are awe-deprived.
Rachel Carson saw what was happening as early as the 1950s. She knew the importance of awe, and over her life she fought pharmaceutical companies and the gender and sex biases of science and journalism, and transcended the early death of her sister, her own cancer, and near-continual financial hardship to write about her favorite systems in nature, warning the world of pesticides like DDT and launching in important ways today’s efforts in the United States to save our planet.
When she realized the ways in which young people were being deprived of awe, she offered an alternative approach in a remarkable essay from
