[About the state of counselling and therapy of parents with their infants in Germany--results of an expertise].

Topic of this study is the acquisition and documentation of all German services of early psychosocial interventions as well as the description of attributes of these care providers. On the basis of this attributes the quality of the offers is evaluated. The services provide counseling and therapy for parents with babies and toddlers. Their aim is to assess and treat disorders of behavior regulation in the context of dysfunctional parent-child-relationships. The expertise was initiated by the German Federal Centre for Health Education. It is based on data of 288 services in Germany. Different attributes of structural and process qualities are described and evaluated e.g. the institutional context, presented problems, training of specialists, kind of interventions. Number and attributes of the early interventions show great variation from region to region. The discrepancy between the number of services and the prevalence of early childhood regulation disorders is high. Due to the unresolved question of financing, parents often have to pay the treatment by themselves. On the basis of the results different implications for the improvement of structural quality are formulated. Relevant issues of research in psychosocial early childhood interventions are discussed.