A Parent's Guide to Raising a Child Who Still Believes in Wonder

There is a particular expression on a child's face when they discover a frost-covered cobweb, or hear a strange sound in the dark, or find a letter waiting on the doormat with their name on it in unfamiliar handwriting. It is not quite happiness. It is something older and more interesting than happiness. It is wonder — and it is the most important thing in the world.

We speak about wonder as though it is inevitable in childhood and equally inevitable that it will fade. We say things like "they're still at that magical age" or "enjoy it while it lasts." But wonder does not leave children of its own accord. It is crowded out. It is explained away. It is replaced, gradually, by the relentless march of the known, the scheduled, the optimised.

Raising a child who believes in wonder is not about keeping them naive. It is about something far more deliberate — and far more important.

What Wonder Actually Is

It is easy to mistake wonder for naivety — the charming but temporary state of not yet knowing how things work. But that is not wonder at all. That is ignorance, and it does fade, quite rightly, as children learn and grow.

Wonder is something else entirely. It is curiosity without anxiety. It is the capacity to be genuinely moved by something — a piece of music, a mathematical pattern, a story, a cloud that looks exactly like a horse. It is openness: the willingness to sit with a question rather than immediately Googling the answer.

The poet Wordsworth called it "spots of time" — those charged, luminous moments in childhood that lodge in the memory and feed the imagination for the rest of a life.

Adults who retain this quality — and many do — are not less intelligent or less realistic than those who do not. They are, in fact, often more creative, more empathic, and more resilient. They have not refused to grow up. They have simply refused to grow closed.

Why It Matters More Than We Think

The research on imagination and play in early childhood is now overwhelming. Studies from the University of Cambridge and elsewhere consistently show that unstructured imaginative play — the kind that involves pretend worlds, invented characters, and open-ended stories — is directly associated with stronger emotional regulation, higher creative thinking scores, and greater social competence in later childhood.

Psychologist Stuart Brown, who spent decades studying play, found that children who engage in rich imaginative play develop what he called "emotional flexibility" — the ability to cope with uncertainty, to tolerate not knowing what comes next. In an age of profound global uncertainty, this is not a soft skill. It is a survival skill.

And at the heart of all of this — the play, the stories, the imagination — is wonder. It is the engine. Knowing how to raise imaginative children in the UK, or anywhere else, begins not with a curriculum or an app, but with protecting the conditions in which wonder can grow.

Five Things Parents Can Do to Cultivate Wonder

None of these require money. Most require only the most difficult thing of all: your unhurried attention.

1. Slow down and notice things together

   Puddles after rain. The geometry of frost on a window. The moth that lands on the kitchen wall at dusk and sits entirely still, as though listening. Children are already noticing these things — they just need an adult to stop beside them and say: yes, look at that. That shared pause, that mutual attention to something small and strange, is where wonder is practised. It costs nothing and takes thirty seconds. Do it every day.

2. Read aloud — and keep reading aloud longer than feels necessary

   We tend to stop reading to children the moment they can read independently, usually around age seven or eight. This is a mistake. The shared experience of a story — the voice, the pacing, the ritual of the same hour each night — is something quite different from silent reading. It builds a private world between parent and child. It introduces language that children would not encounter alone. And it tells them, quietly but unmistakably, that stories matter enough to be spoken out loud. Read to them at nine, at ten, at eleven. They will not object as much as you fear.

3. Protect pretend play — don't rush children into organised activities

   The instinct to fill a child's week with clubs, classes, and coached activities comes from love. But the hours between structured activities — the long, formless Saturday afternoons — are precisely when children build imaginary kingdoms, conduct experiments with mud and sticks, and work out, through play, who they are. Boredom is not a problem to be solved. It is the precondition for invention. Resist the pressure to schedule every hour, and watch what fills the space instead.

4. Make ritual out of ordinary things

   There is magic available on an unremarkable Tuesday, if you know where to look. Pancakes every Friday. A particular song on the school run. The candle lit at dinner, every dinner, even in June. Children live in ritual — they find it deeply reassuring, and ritual is the closest thing to enchantment that ordinary life offers. When you make something a tradition, you are telling a child that this moment is worth marking. That ordinary time is, in fact, full of meaning. That is a profound gift.

5. Keep the post alive — give children things to look forward to arriving

   There is something about a letter that a screen cannot replicate. The weight of it. The handwriting. The fact that someone, somewhere, sat down and wrote this for you specifically. Children who receive physical post — real letters, addressed to them by name — learn something important: that they are known, that they are thought of, that the world beyond the front door contains people who care about what they are doing and who they are becoming. Anticipation is itself a form of wonder. Give children things to wait for.

The Role of Stories in Building Real Children

A child who has lived inside a fictional world — who has suffered with a character, rejoiced with them, been frightened for them — has practiced emotions they have not yet encountered in real life. This is what stories are for. They are not a distraction from the real world; they are a preparation for it.

C.S. Lewis, who thought more carefully about imagination than almost anyone, put it simply: "Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." He understood that the stories we need as children are not lesser than the ones we need as adults. They are earlier versions of the same conversation about what it means to be brave, or kind, or lost, or found.

When we give children stories — whether in books, in letters, in the tales we tell at bedtime — we are giving them a richer inner life. We are helping them learn how to feel things fully without being destroyed by them. We are, in the truest sense, giving them something to read that they will remember.

And that inner richness — the ability to imagine, to feel, to inhabit another perspective — is exactly what wonder produces and wonder protects. If you want to understand how to keep the sense of magic alive all year long, start here: with stories, with ritual, with the small daily practice of paying attention to the world alongside your child.

Wonder Is Not Childishness

We have confused wonder with innocence, and innocence with ignorance. And because we believe children must eventually lose their innocence — must face the world as it is — we treat wonder as a casualty of growing up, an acceptable loss in the passage to maturity.

But wonder is not naivety. It is not a refusal to see clearly. It is, if anything, the capacity to see more clearly than most — to notice what others have grown too accustomed to notice, to be moved by what others have forgotten to feel.

Einstein called it the most beautiful thing we can experience. Keats built an entire philosophy of art around it, calling it negative capability — the ability to remain in uncertainty without an irritable reaching after fact and reason. Every great scientist, every great artist, every person who has done something original with their time on earth has had it in some measure.

It is not the beginning of childhood. It is the beginning of everything good.

Raising a child who believes in wonder means raising a child who will be curious when others are incurious, open when others are closed, alive to the strangeness and beauty of things long after the world has stopped pointing it out to them. It means giving them a quality that no school can teach and no qualification can confer.

It is the most important thing you can do. And it starts, as all the best things do, with stopping for a moment and looking at what is already here. For more practical ideas on nurturing wonder year-round, our guide on 12 magical ways to celebrate each month is a companion worth bookmarking — and if your child is beginning to ask difficult questions about belief, our piece on when children stop believing in Father Christmas offers some gentle, thoughtful perspectives.