Tovah Klein

Tovah P. Klein, Ph.D. Director of the Barnard College Center for Toddler Development and Adjunct Associate Professor, joined the Barnard psychology faculty in 1995. She teaches a year-long course on research and theory in toddler development.

Prior to coming to Barnard she was a clinical fellow at Harvard and clinical psychology intern at Boston Children’s Hospital. She received her doctorate in psychology from Duke University.

Her research, teaching and applied work focus on children and families. Klein’s 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 and being a parent during the pandemic. She has studied large-scale traumatic events such as witnessing the attacks of 9/11 and the Japan earthquake and tsunami of 2011. She also studies children’s play as a means to communicate and process emotions and stressful experiences.

Klein is an advisor to programs for children worldwide, including Room to Grow, Ubuntu Pathways, Children’s Museum of Manhattan and Hunts Point Alliance for Children; she is an advisor to children’s media including National Geographic and Apple TV+.

She is the author of two books, 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).