Understanding Child Development

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Wonder is present in infancy as babies make meaning from relationships and experience.

Wonder helps direct attention, learning, and meaning-making from the earliest days of life.

Responsive relationships transform everyday moments into opportunities for deeper learning.

Wonder is often described as an emotion or a behavior, but it is more accurately understood as a state that integrates both. Fueled by curiosity, surprise, confusion, delight, anticipation, and connection, wonder invites children to see the familiar with fresh eyes, engage the unknown, and transform experience into meaning. In turn, wonder fuels the imagination—not simply the capacity for pretend play, but the ability to hold symbolic ideas in mind, consider multiple possibilities, and develop skills such as cognitive flexibility, perspective-taking, and problem-solving1.

Children wonder about experiences that feel significant to them. Emotions signal that significance, organizing attention, memory, interpretation, and action as children work to understand how an experience fits into their developing sense of themselves, their relationships, and the world around them.

All learning occurs through a dynamic process of meaning-making, supported by an authentic state of wonder, not repetition alone. As children explore their worlds and take note of patterns and themes, choosing what information gets digested and what gets ignored, they are relying on the cues of important adults, the emotional information they experience, and their own internal sense of motivation to stay immersed in a state of wonder.

Maintaining a sense of wonder as they explore helps children develop the habits of mind........

© Psychology Today