Ep. 297: Fostering Awe and Wonder in Parenting with Deborah Farmer Kris – PBS
Parenting Great Kids with Dr. Meg Meeker
Dr. Meg Meeker
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 21 October 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From finding joy in small, everyday moments to leveraging technology as a tool for inspiration, this episode offers practical advice for overwhelmed parents and emphasizes how awe can be a protective emotional anchor in today’s chaotic world.
Whether it's watching clouds, taking in art, or sharing a heartfelt show like Carl the Collector, you’ll walk away with actionable tips and renewed inspiration to reconnect with your child through the lens of wonder.
About Our Guest: Deborah Farmer Kris
Deborah Farmer Kris is a parenting journalist, education columnist, and child development expert with a deep passion for helping families rediscover joy and connection. She is a columnist for PBS KIDS for Parents and the founder of Parenthood365, where she offers practical resources to help parents navigate the beautiful (and messy) moments of everyday life. Deborah is also an educational consultant and frequent speaker on how to cultivate awe, resilience, and curiosity in children.
Resources:
Raising Awe-Seekers: How the Science of Wonder Helps Our Kids Thrive (Free Spirit Parenting™) – Paperback, May 27, 2025
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From finding joy in small, everyday moments to leveraging technology as a tool for inspiration, this episode offers practical advice for overwhelmed parents and emphasizes how awe can be a protective emotional anchor in today’s chaotic world.
Whether it's watching clouds, taking in art, or sharing a heartfelt show like Carl the Collector, you’ll walk away with actionable tips and renewed inspiration to reconnect with your child through the lens of wonder.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On today's episode of Parenting Great Kids. |
| 0:04.0 | In a time when anxiety is rising and joy feels harder to come by. |
| 0:09.0 | What if the answer lies in something ancient and powerful? |
| 0:14.0 | And so being able to almost have kind of radical curiosity about my own kids and what lights them up is really important |
| 0:23.1 | here. Welcome to parenting great kids. Here's your host, Dr. Meg Meeker. Deborah, it's so fun to |
| 0:30.3 | have you on PGK today. Thank you so much for having me. Now, when we think of awe sounds beautiful, but it's a little bit abstract. I mean, we know |
| 0:41.5 | what it feels like. It's hard to describe, but what does it actually look like when we're |
| 0:50.3 | parenting in this sort of this daily chaos? So I think being able to recognize what it feels like is really key. |
| 0:58.3 | Because when we think about emotions, especially with kids, |
| 1:01.8 | we often default to things like happy, mad, sad, scared, stressed, anxious, |
| 1:06.7 | something in that realm. |
| 1:09.8 | And in fact, when I give parenting talks on, you know, emotional |
| 1:13.1 | intelligence, the phrase is awe and wonder almost never pop up as emotions. And yet they are. |
| 1:20.0 | And they're emotions that we are designed to feel. So how do you know you're feeling it? Well, |
| 1:26.9 | when researchers try to say somebody feels this, |
| 1:31.5 | what is that really happening in the body? Think about goosebumps for some people. |
| 1:36.3 | Think about your eyes spontaneously filling with tears. You hear a beautiful song. You see a moving moment. |
| 1:48.5 | The utterance of wow or some type of woe, |
| 1:52.2 | they found cross-culturally, that even if you don't speak another language, |
| 1:55.5 | but you hear a person doing that, you know they're experiencing wonder. |
| 1:59.4 | It's this almost instinct of, oh, when something amazing is happening, |
| 2:01.3 | the whole stadium erupts with that sound. |
... |
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