Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D.

Tina Payne Bryson, Ph.D. is the author of The Bottom Line for Baby (2020) and co-author, with Dan Siegel, MD (FAN ’16), of The Power of Showing Up, The Yes Brain, and two New York Times bestsellers – The Whole-Brained Child and No-Drama Discipline, each of which has been translated into over fifty languages. The Whole-Brained Child has now sold over a million copies.

Bryson is a psychotherapist and the founder and executive director of The Center for Connection, a multidisciplinary clinical practice, and the co-founder, with Georgie Wisen-Vincent, LMFT, of The Play Strong Institute, a center devoted to the study, research, and practice of play therapy through a neurodevelopment lens.

Bryson’s new book, coauthored with Wisen-Vincent, is The Way of Play: Using Little Moments of Big Connection to Raise Calm and Confident Kids.

Bryson keynotes conferences and conducts workshops for kids, parents, educators, clinicians, and industry leaders all over the world, and she makes frequent media appearances (for example, in TIME Magazine, Good Morning America, Huffington Post, Redbook, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Real Simple). She also works as a child development specialist at St. Mark’s School in Pasadena, CA.

A graduate of Baylor University, Bryson earned her LCSW and Ph.D. from the University of Southern California, where her research explored attachment science, childrearing theory, and the emerging field of interpersonal neurobiology.