In Hunt, Gather, Parent, the author shares many ideas and practical tools for helping children regulate their emotions. Most of them I’d already heard of, or have been using for a while. But there was one small technique that stopped me in my tracks: “Parent with Awe”—cultivating a child’s sense of reverence and wonder toward nature and life itself, and using that awe to help them step away from negative emotions.

When I read that section, I felt a brief jolt of surprise. It was the first time I’d encountered this approach so explicitly—yet at the same time it felt strangely familiar, like something I had always known but had forgotten how to name. And then, somewhere deep inside me, a door I didn’t even realize existed swung open. Sunlight poured in, and a cascade of scenes rose up at once, vivid as if they’d been waiting all along.

As a child, I was a very introverted girl. I loved to sit in silence, to drift, to daydream. My parents had eight biological children and adopted one more; I was the sixth. In those days there wasn’t truly free public education—not in the way people mean it now. Even “public” school came with hefty fees each year. After my parents did everything they could to keep nine children clothed, fed, and in school, there simply wasn’t much energy left for anything else.

So most of the time, we were raised in a kind of free-range way.

That wide-open freedom meant that early each morning, my siblings and I would scatter like birds released from a cage. During school hours we went to different classes and sometimes different schools. After school, the outgoing ones ran off to find friends and fun. And the quiet ones—like me—stayed in our rooms, drawing or staring into space, perfectly content in our own little worlds.

Looking back now, I don’t remember many scenes of myself playing with friends. What I remember most clearly are those small, private moments of being alone.

Every Lunar New Year, for instance, we would visit relatives. While the adults sat talking, I’d get so bored I’d slip into a kind of trance—staring at a single patch of sunlight that crept through a crack in the door and landed on the wall. In that tiny circle of light, I would conjure an entire universe: streets and houses of every kind, people living inside them, busy lives moving in and out, a whole world unfolding in silence.

Or when I fought with my siblings and ran outside to cry, I’d be pulled in by the ants in the grass. I’d watch them march in lines, carrying a single grain of white rice together—orderly, disciplined, astonishingly coordinated—heading toward their nest. I would marvel at how they communicated, how they cooperated, how they shared.

Only when an adult called my name would I realize how long I’d been lost in that watching. And by then, the emotions that had been boiling over just moments before were already gone—vanished without a trace. What remained was a chest full of wonder.

Now that I think about it, wasn’t that exactly what “Parent with Awe” is pointing to? As a child, I was already using reverence and wonder—my awe at nature’s strange and exquisite craftsmanship—to redirect my attention, to let the energy that might have fed anger or sadness flow out through a different channel. That channel was the honest, involuntary astonishment you feel when you witness the world’s wild ingenuity—nature’s uncanny beauty, its impossible designs, its quiet power.

So the next time your child is spiraling into a mood, try this: take them to look at the little blades of grass pushing up through the cracks in the sidewalk—so small, yet so stubbornly alive. Chase a butterfly through a cluster of flowers—life so brief, yet so dazzling. Tilt your head up to the night sky and tell them that the faint dot of light they’re seeing has traveled hundreds of thousands of light-years just to meet their eyes.

Ask them to place a hand over their chest and feel their heartbeat. Tell them the human heart beats, without sleeping, roughly three trillion times over a lifetime. And when you’re video-calling relatives far away, remind them: once upon a time, a greeting like this had to travel by letter for months before it arrived—yet now it takes only seconds. Isn’t that a kind of miracle, too?

Maybe their small minds can’t yet grasp astronomical numbers. Maybe they can’t fully understand how much modern technology has changed our lives. But they can feel our gaze, our voice, our posture—the reverence and wonder we carry. Slowly, they’ll begin to sense that nature, life, and creation itself are among the greatest, most sacred things we can give our time and attention to. And that awe—practiced again and again in ordinary moments—can become the brain’s default pathway, a familiar route that helps us step out of negative spirals and turn toward something brighter. It trains us to use our inner energy to enjoy and explore life, instead of spending it on endless internal friction.

I believe that nurturing awe and reverence—for nature, for life, for creation—is a precious and beautiful gift we can give our children. It will stay with them for a lifetime, offering them energy and strength to face life’s unpredictability: its sudden turns, its wind and frost, its storms and snow.

And perhaps, as we try to awaken wonder in them, something in us will be awakened too. The curiosity about life and nature and creation that modern anxiety has worn down day by day might be rekindled. Maybe we’ll start again—like children—to pause on our hurried paths. To watch flowers bloom and fall. To see clouds gather and unravel. To listen to the hum of insects, the calls of birds, the sound of wind and rain.

And maybe, at last, we’ll find ourselves thinking: oh. Happiness can be this simple.