"Stress can be good or bad or ugly, added neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen, Ph.D., the Alfred E. Mirsky Professor at Rockefeller University in New York....
“The neurobiology of stress undergoes dramatic changes over the childhood years,” said panelist Megan Gunnar, Ph.D., a professor of child development at the University of Minnesota. “During childhood, paradoxically, children are both buffered from and highly vulnerable to psychosocial stressors,” said Gunnar. “However, the impact of those stressors may not be fully realized until adolescence.”
"Even among poor children, however, there are important individual differences in susceptibility to adversity, said Boyce, who has studied children’s autonomic and adrenocortical responses to psychological tests in the lab.
"He observed children in both supportive and high-adversity contexts and then divided them into groups with high and low reactivity.
"Some were “dandelion children,” he concluded, adopting a term translated from Swedish. Like the ubiquitous weed, they could do well in high- or low-stress settings. “These were the kids with low reactivity, who were stable and relatively indifferent to social context,” he said...."
http://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/newsarticle.aspx?articleid=1695920
A paper by Boyce, Sokolowski, and Robinson, “Toward a New Biology of Social Adversity,” is posted at http://www.pnas.org/content/109/suppl.2/17143.long.
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