Resilience, strengths, and regulatory capacities: Hidden resources in developmental disorders of infant mental health.

Resilience research has demonstrated convincingly that the strengths of resilient children growing up adaptively in the midst of adversity can be traced back to salient attributes of the parent--infant system. Drawing on various strands of developmental infancy research, the present essay focuses on strengths in infants' intrinsic regulatory capacities, in the parents' intuitive communicative competence, and in parent--infant communication as a biologically based, reciprocal reward system. Adaptive and protective roles of the system are discussed in relation to normal developmental perturbations and individual variation on both sides of the system and, based on results from the Munich Interdisciplinary Research and Intervention Program for Fussy Babies, in relation to early excessive crying and other disorders of behavioral and emotional regulation. The final section outlines how this knowledge can be applied in systemic, strength-based approaches to parent--infant counseling and psychotherapy, with emphasis on the therapeutic potential of videomicroanalytic feedback.