Nudity and children

Illustration of clothing-optional beach.

Attitudes toward the nudity of children and children seeing nude people vary substantially, depending on the child's culture, age and the context of the nudity. They have also changed over time and particularly in recent years.

General attitudes

Before the age of about 5, children cannot have any expectation of privacy when nude for the purely functional reasons of physical cleaning and maintenance by adults. After toilet training, children usually continue to be bathed nude in the presence of their parents or other adults until about 8 years old. Modesty typically only begins to appear after the child becomes self-maintaining and no longer requires constant adult supervision for bathing and dressing.

For similar reasons people of any age who are severely mentally or physically disabled, or are temporarily in hospitals due to severe illness or injuries, cannot have any expectation of modesty due to the functional need for waste removal, general bodily hygiene, and/or assistance in bathing by nurses and caregivers.

Bathing in a small metal bathtub

Many parents believe nudity is both physically and emotionally healthy for children. Web columnist Stacy DeBroff suggests that nudity in very young children also helps with toilet training.

Exposure that would be forbidden in public is often allowed or even encouraged in familiar circles, amongst peers of the same sex, and/or with relatives or educators.

The degree to which depiction of child nudity is considered appropriate or not varies; see also Nudity in art.

There have been incidents in which snapshots taken by parents of their infant or toddler children bathing or otherwise naked were destroyed or turned over to law enforcement as child pornography.

United Kingdom

Media

British TV is required to avoid displaying scenes of sex from 5:30am to 9pm (the so-called "watershed") to avoid viewing by children. The Broadcasting Code requires that "Nudity before the watershed must be justified by the context." Hansard. shelf magazines".

Non-western cultures

See also main article Nudity for more information.

Family in Brazil, Praia do Abricó

Boys skinny dipping in a sacred tank of water in India.

In various cultures children can go publicly naked (fully or strategically) while adults don't, usually until an age or ceremony considered the start of adolescence or of adulthood. An example of a rite of passage in a Benin tribe, traditional body scarification on the head is performed on a small child while completely naked, but a boy being initiated as an adult bares only the torso (where the scars are made).

Attitudes toward nudity vary greatly within East Asia: China and North Korea tend toward the conservative side, while Japan and Hong Kong are more liberal. In Japan, nudity is still the norm in public baths and pool showers, and outdoor hot spring baths in particular were mixed gender until the Meiji period. Over the last century, this has slowly been changing with most public baths in large cities now offering separate baths for men and women or requiring the use of swimsuits. It is also common for young children to join a parent of the opposite gender in a public bath, or to wander around naked while changing at the beach. Unisex baths persist in the countryside, but there has been a slow movement to sex-segregated baths as Japan urbanizes. Sumo wrestlers and the participants at Shinto nude festivals wear Fundoshi, a loin cloth which exposes the buttocks.

Despite the relative prevalence of traditional attitudes for adults in China, however, children continue to wear open shorts, permitting them to more easily relieve themselves. In the preparations for the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics, some have called for the end of the traditional permissiveness for adult males to go shirtless in public during warm weather.

Nudity in physical education

Henry Scott Tuke, The Bathers

United States

In the United States and English-Speaking Canada, students at tax funded schools have historically been required to shower communally with classmates of the same sex after physical education class. In the United States, public objections and the threat of lawsuits have caused a number of school districts in recent years to choose to make showers optional for students. However, some US schools continue to require all students to shower as part of their school's required physical education curriculum.

Several popular television sitcoms, as well as children's books, have portrayed the embarrassment sometimes caused by compulsory communal showering in a humorous light. Still, many students find the adjustment to school showers to be quite uncomfortable, and some teachers and parents attempt to understand and enforce this often unpopular policy.

The US courts have held that all students, not just student athletes, also have a reduced expectation of personal privacy. All students participate in "communal undress" in the required physical education classes.. Notably, a majority of traditionalists who favor continuing required school showers are not known to favor nudity outside this limited situation. Despite this precedent, most schools and teachers prefer to encourage rather than require showers for economic reasons (lack of towels or facilities) and/or concerns over potential parental complaints.

For religious reasons, many Muslim parents strongly object to communal school showers and demand privacy partitions. Other parents have raised objections that the inclusion of compulsory showers in the physical education curriculum conflicts with the privacy beliefs of their families. An increasing number of schools have responded to these complaints by allowing students to shower in swimsuits or by constructing some secluded showers to allow a privacy option for any student who so chooses.

Other school boards, however, have still resolutely declined to provide options for privacy accommodations during PE showers. Four common reasons are used by these schools to justify requiring communal showers as part of the physical education curriculum:

Français : Roberto Rive (18?-1889), Enfants nus à Naples, 1870.

• Some tax funded schools believe that all students should learn to feel comfortable entering open dressing and showering environments, and part of the school's mission is to educate the entire child.

• Budgetary and logistical constraints often make privacy options too expensive to be managed with available time and funds. Other schools have argued that since adding privacy accommodations involves spending substantial tax money simply to meet the belief systems of particular religious groups, that public schools are prohibited by the establishment clause from making these changes.

• A small percentage of students have always objected to communal showers; however, after the first few days of school showers, these students very frequently overcame the initial embarrassment and were fine. In most cases, the objections to school showers are actually from the student's parents, while the student in question does not object to having to take showers.

• Students within the school environment have less expectation of privacy than members of the population generally..

Compulsory communal showering remains a controversial subject for many worldwide. However, throughout much of the world, students in physical education classes undress and shower together on a daily basis. For better or for worse, school showers have been most youths' introduction into communal nudity.

In the United States, an adult that will not shower nude in the presence of others may experience occasional inconvenience. Most locker rooms in colleges, YMCA's, water parks, and weight rooms do not provide private bathing facilities. During basic training in the US Military, bathing is communal without privacy partitions.

An alternate option for the modest child in an unforgiving educational environment is to minimize the physical participation as much as possible, or to simply not participate or completely skip out of the physical education classes, so as to remain clean and sweat-free the rest of the school day. This may result in pressure from parents, classmates and/or school staff. If you are required to take PE, you will receive a poor grade if you do not participate.

Europe

Statue along the coast promenade in San Agustin, Gran Canaria, Spain.

Europeans have generally been more insistent that all students shower communally.

The relation to nudity varies substantially within Europe, with Scandinavia in the north being the most open to it. Children in Scandinavia are very likely to grow up with a relaxed attitude to adult nudity, and activities such as sharing baths, saunas and bathrooms with parents and siblings are common. Communal bathing before and after sports activities in public and private places is therefore common and may even occasionally be mixed. Generally, public places are required to provide a same gender changing area.

Finland is well known for its long traditions of mixed gender sauna and hot baths.

In Austria, Germany and the Netherlands the general approach to nudity is relaxed, though not everywhere. Certain Catholic communities may represent a much stricter approach to public nudity than the Protestant communities. Commonly bathing in schools and after sports activities does though remain the rule.

In southern Europe, notably in Italy and Malta, the approach is different. It is very unlikely that children will ever have seen their parents nude. Approaches to nudity can vary within each country. People in northern Germany are more open to nudity and nudism than people in southern Germany.

References

En premiär by Anders Zorn

Further reading

• The Naked Child Growing Up Without Shame/Social Nudity/Its Effect on Children by Dennis Craig Smith, William Sparks. Elysium Growth Pr, ISBN 1-55599-001-0.
• Storey, Mark Children, Social Nudity and Academic Research Nude & Natural magazine, 23.4 Summer 2004.
• Storey, Mark Children, Social Nudity and Scholarly Study
• Storey, Mark "Dr. Spock and Family Nudity." Nude & Natural 18.3 (1999): 68-80.
• Story, Marilyn D. "Factors Associated with More Positive Body Self-Concepts in Preschool Children." Journal of Social Psychology 108.1 (1979): 49-56.
• Thomas Mann: Mario and the Magician - includes an incident where an 8-year-old girl is briefly nude on the beach, causing problems

See also

• Issues in social nudity
• Nudity and sexuality
• Child sexuality
• Nudity in sport
• Public nudity

External links

• wikiHow: How to Practice Nudity in your Family
• iVillage: Nudity: Inappropriate in front of the kids? by Gayle Peterson, PhD
• St. Petersburg Times, Can't critic see camp is nude, but not lewd? By JAN GLIDEWELL Published June 22, 2003
• The Bi-College News: Protect the Children From All that Nudity: Nude Art and Young Minds By Jessie Post, October 10, 2006.
• About.com Child Care: Could a Sex Offender Be Coaching Your Kid? By Robin McClure
• The Detroit News: Coaches slip crime checks; kids at risk By Fred Girard, March 14, 2004

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