When I gave birth to a child for the first time, I was deeply moved by the realization and responsibility of becoming a parent, as well as the preciousness of life. From now on I felt that I would desperately live just to protect this life.
Many narratives referred to the bodily responses of awe, the tears, chills, tingling, and the urge to hold and touch and feel skin-to-skin warmth. Common to the narratives were references to a sense of transcendent, boundary-dissolving connection whose neurophysiology is now becoming understood. Recent research finds that both parents show elevated levels of oxytocin, that neuropeptide that promotes boundary-dissolving openness and connection, six months after the birth of their first child. And a region of the mammalian hypothalamus, the MPOA, activates patterns of parenting in both women and men, whether heterosexual or gay. The MPOA is responsive to the sights and sounds of infants—the skin, cooing, cuddling, touch, mutual gaze, and fragrance and softness of the tops of their heads. This region of the brain activates dopamine release and deactivates the threat-sensitive amygdala. This synchronized neurophysiology of parent and child underpins the shared attention and intersubjectivity so common in experiences of awe across the wonders of life.
In many stories, people found their own moral beauty in the birth of a child, as in these narratives from Russia and China:
The birth of my son. It was nine years ago. I was happy with the maternity ward. I wanted to hug the entire world.
The birth of my child made me truly have the sense of awe. It made me see the miracle of life and it also made me more tough and tolerant when I interacted with people around me.
Some stories revealed how the arrival of a child triggers the nesting instinct humans express as childbirth approaches, which this Brazilian dad finds in, of all things, buying new furniture and filling out forms!
The birth of my first son. In 1992. I was in Natal Rio Grande do Norte. With me was my first wife. Before, I bought new furniture to welcome him! Right after, I took care of making him a health insurance plan.
There are a limited number of species, outside of bird species, that “nest” like we do. The nests they create are where offspring are born, and out of which community members forage for food and return and eat together in safety. The “nests” we create often contain cultural archives of awe—music, lullabies, books, images of people of moral beauty, mobiles with beautiful geometries, wallpaper with life patterns. Those nests become home, an entrance into a culture’s ways of awe.
And what is true of new caregivers is true of grandparents, so often awestruck by the arrival of grandchildren, as in this story from France:
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 Woman’s Home Companion, placed in between recipes for mayonnaise and potato salad and ads for Best Foods. In her essay “Help Your Child to Wonder,” Carson lays out an awe-based approach to raising children.
It begins with a story of awe about her twenty-month-old nephew, Roger, whom she would raise because of her sister’s early death. They wander down to the Atlantic Ocean one wild, stormy night. Getting soaked and risking colds, they laugh at the frothy waves, finding a “spine-tingling response to the vast, roaring ocean and the wild night around us.” Later, on a rain-drenched walk in Maine woods, Roger delights in the now spongy texture of the lichen on rocks: “getting down on chubby knees to feel it and running from one patch to another . . . with squeals of pleasure.” I bet they sounded like weee and wow amid longer periods of open-mouthed, wide-eyed silence.