The infant at risk.

The opportunity in early infancy for joining the developmental processes of infants with the energy in the parents for bringing the infants to their best potential has been out of proportion to our expectations. By visualizing the capacity of babies to organize around the positive experiences of interaction with a nurturing adult in our neonatal assessments, we have better understood normal recovery processes from labor and delivery and plasticity for recovery from CNS insults in the neonate. As we observed and identified with them to produce best behavior in the infants, their parents were able to believe in our methods and to work toward their infants' optimal recovery. Hence, our assessments of premature and normal infants became a window for us and for parents into organization and ongoing development. In later infancy, the face-to-face procedure served a similar purpose. In other words, within the observational assessment of a small baby is contained not only the organizational capacities of his or her present status, but also an opportunity to see what he will do to his parents and what they will have to do to organize him. By sharing this observation with them, we share these processes and give them an opportunity to identify the baby's positive potential in addition to his or her deficits. As such, parents can utilize the forces for nurturance in their relationship to produce the baby's optimal recovery. Serial observations over time provide an opportunity to observe the baby's capacity to organize himself as he recovers from a known set of experiences surrounding labor, delivery, and a new environment.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)