Tovah P. Klein, PhD

Developmental psychologist, bestselling author, and speaker

 

Tovah P. Klein, PhD, is a professor of psychology at Barnard College and the Director of the Barnard Center for Toddler Development. She is the author of the USA Today bestseller Raising Resilience: How to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty (HarperCollins, 2024) and How Toddlers Thrive: What Parents Can Do Today to Plant the Seeds of Lifelong Success (Simon & Schuster, 2014).

 

Dr. Klein has devoted her professional life to helping children thrive in the face of everyday uncertainty, as well as devastating events. Her research aims to understand children's social and emotional development, parental influences on children’s development, and parents' experiences raising children, including the challenges of combining work and family. She has studied large-scale traumatic events, such as witnessing the attacks of 9/11, the Japan earthquake and tsunami of 2011, and parenting during the COVID-19 lockdown. She integrates her work in typical development and parenting challenges with her work on trauma to understand how to best support parents to raise healthy, grounded, and resilient children.

 

Dr. Klein is an alum of the University of Michigan and received her doctorate in psychology from Duke University. She served as a clinical fellow at Harvard, a fellow at the Yale Child Study Center, and visiting research fellow at UCLA. She speaks to audiences worldwide about child development and is an advisor to a wide range of children’s media. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Parents, and Motherly, among others. Tovah is the mother of three adult sons and lives in NYC.