Essentially, we humans live well enough and long enough, and are smart enough, to generate all sorts of stressful events purely in our heads.

The younger boy...by remaining a boy forever, by not growing up...will at least have some chance of pleasing his mother, winning her love. Although there is no evidence of disease or malnutrition in his well-to-do family, he ceases growing.



The forlorn boy became the author of the much-beloved children’s classic Peter Pan.

Sometimes the stressor can be the failure to provide something for an organism, and the absence of touch is seemingly one of the most marked of developmental stressors that we can suffer.