She worked in academia in the early years after completing graduate school, and then she became a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) researcher who observed child behavior and parent-child interactions.
A faculty member named Hulsey Cason encouraged her to go to graduate school and helped her to identify child development as a specialization.
[5] Her 1952 book, They Learn What They Live: Prejudice in Young Children, which she co-wrote with Helen G. Trager, was cited in the Brown v. Board of Education desegregation case.
She wrote about psychological resilience, discovering that some children of depressed mothers, especially boys, were not influenced as significantly by maternal mood disorders.
She found that mothers with bipolar disorder tended to have children who thrived in elementary school; later, she discovered that this advantage disappeared by adolescence.