‘A Container and an Anchor’

In 2016, Professor Tovah Klein began to brainstorm about writing a new book, one that would encapsulate the themes from the work she’s done with children and parents as the longtime director of Barnard’s Center for Toddler Development. “I thought that I really 

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should write a book on uncertainty,” she says. “Uncertainty is the constant — whether on a day-to-day basis or during a crisis, uncertainty is what parents are facing.”

She set the project aside until the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns made the topic newly, widely relevant, a time when “uncertainty” felt like an understatement.

“When things are really shaky,” Klein says, “the question is: What’s developing in the child at this time, and what do we need to do to prepare children for life?” She continues: “We have to focus on both what the child needs in the immediate and what they need for ongoing development so they can grow up to handle life and the adversity that they will face, big or small.”

In the Toddler Center, the answer was consistency. The team continued its programming in a tent across campus from its homebase in Milbank Hall. “It was us, a few grounds people, the CARES team, and a few Facilities people. That was it for an entire semester,” Klein says of the scene at the College. But that adjustment, too, helped shape her writing.

When Klein submitted her manuscript, her editors at HarperCollins decided that a book about thriving amid uncertainty was actually a book about resilience, the latter necessary to weather the former. The reframed book is called Raising Resilience: How to Help Our Children Thrive in Times of Uncertainty (September 2024), written with Billie Fitzpatrick.

The book draws on Klein’s deep expertise in parent-child relationships to create a parenting primer full of nuance, empathy, and hope. The key to raising resilient children, she writes, is for parents to serve as both a container and an anchor for their kids, offering a safe harbor where they feel fully accepted. This security then becomes part of children’s internalized sense of self as they mature. To do this effectively, Klein writes, parents must recognize and address their own “stuff” so that they see their children unfiltered rather than through the lens of their own biases that parents bring from their upbringings.

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“It’s really about us as parents knowing ourselves, knowing what we bring to this, knowing what we’re thinking, so we can be there to protect the children,” Klein says. “When really bad things happen, it’s a moment to showcase a child’s resilience, but that resilience has been building through those relationships over time.”

The book is further divided into five “pillars,” including emotional safety, emotional regulation, limits vs. freedom, connection, and acceptance. Though all five are in play throughout childhood and adolescence, Klein writes that parents can focus on whichever pillar most needs attention in their family.

Klein writes from a perspective of optimism that most parents are doing their best within widely varying circumstances and that any genuine efforts can make positive change. It’s not about being perfect, she writes, citing psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott, who espoused the idea that being a “good enough” parent — not perfection — is what children need to thrive.

“I am an incurable optimist, filled with hope for our futures,” she writes toward the end of the book’s introduction. “I’ve seen hundreds, if not thousands, of children and parents pull through countless situations that at first looked insurmountable and, with support and connection, watched them move forward with strength and resilience.”