In all our research we only ran into this once. In an article entitled: "The Peter Pan Syndrome: Selfhood in the Church of Africa" by Ogbu U. Kalu in Missiology, January 1975 p15.
Kalu wrote:
"The Peter Pan Syndrome can be related to a mission church which never grows up. This is a result of both wanting to remain comfortable in the arms of mother church, and later in the mother church overdoing help and control."
While it might be true that some of the local people react bitterly to what they perceive to be colonialistic policies. Your observer has interviewed many of these people. At the same time many are quite comfortable in an organization that takes care of them.
Your observer has identified many of these people in many places where outdated missions strategies have all but killed local initiative. Those, like Kalu, who are sensitive to a patronizing missionary attitude play an important role. They remind the outsiders that they should not think of themselves as indispensable. At the same time, those who are comfortable with the missionary as "father" and "mother" give the missionary his/her reason for being. Most often the second group predominates.
"It must not be supposed that missionaries were all the time resisting the passionate desire of their people for independence. The vast majority of the Christians, never having experienced anything but the 'colonial' situation of missions, were fairly well content with its advantage, and had hardly an idea that it could be changed. And the the possibilities of change were put before the, many Christians of the younger Churches viewed the proposal with horror."