Be It Every So Naked...

Nudity in the home

Nothing so divides families as the issue of nakedness, says Marianne Kavanagh

The Telegraph (U.K.)

February 9, 2008

Outside the home, families tend to behave with a certain conformity. But behind closed doors, there is no such thing as standard behaviour. Some families keep guinea pigs. Others eat Marmite. Some watch The Vicar of Dibley. But no habit splits the nation so dramatically as nudity. Some of us wander quite happily about in nothing but our birthday suits. Others view nakedness as a brief but necessary state between, say, a bath and pyjamas. But all of us have quite distinct opinions about whether or not we are comfortable stripping off in front of our children.

"I see it as my duty," says a friend, "to remind my teenage sons that this is what women really look like. It's no good them growing up thinking we all look like those airbrushed pictures in magazines." Others wouldn't dream of being seen in the buff, grabbing towels and dressing-gowns to cover the relevant dangly bits.

"It's purely practical," says one father. "Spend any time naked in our house and you'd freeze to death." Some change their habits as the children grow older. You share a bath with your baby and happily strip off in front of your toddler, but find yourself becoming increasingly modest once your child goes to school.

It's hard to rise above direct comments about a Rubenesque shape. "Mummy," said a friend's five-year-old admiringly as her mother left the bath, "what a big bottom!" "I think I cover up more now that the children are teenagers," says another mum, "but that's more for their sake than mine.

I don't tend to bother about being naked in the bedroom, because that's my domain."

"It's quite useful if I'm upstairs wrapping birthday presents," says Katie. "My 13-year-old hates seeing me naked, so I just shout 'No clothes on!' and I can hear him scuttling back down the stairs." If you're going to let it all hang out, you need a positive body image. Gravity takes its toll, after all, and the more mature human form seems to benefit from a little support. Perhaps this is what was behind the leaked email from Jeremy Paxman, presenter of BBC2's Newsnight, to Marks & Spencer boss Sir Stuart Rose. Complaining about M&S underwear, Paxman wrote of the "widespread gusset anxiety" among his friends.

"I think nudity depends on whether your house has a lot of mirrors," says Louisa. "I didn't mind drifting about naked in my 20s, but nowadays I come across a full-length mirror and think, 'Bloody hell!'"

It's probably easier for mothers to strip off in front of their daughters, and fathers in front of their sons - it is, after all, a division we're used to from the days we eased our shivering children back into their clothes at the swimming pool. But the solidarity encountered when one sex heavily outnumbers the other can be alarming.

One father, who works away from home during the week, comes back to his wife and four daughters on Friday night and feels hopelessly out of place. "He keeps asking, rather desperately, 'Is that appropriate? ' because we're all wandering about naked," says his wife fondly. "But we don't take any notice of him."

If you find the idea of nudity in the home troubling, it may be because your parents were buttoned, braced and belted. We seem to pass on our ideas about nakedness to the next generation.

"When I was growing up," says a friend whose daughters quite happily sit about without a stitch on, "you couldn't lock yourself away modestly in the bathroom because the rest of the family would hammer on the door, shouting, 'What are you doing in there?'"

You might, on the other hand, decide to turn your back on a naturist upbringing. One friend, who feels in retrospect that her parents were complete exhibitionists, keeps nudity at home to a minimum.

"Be sensitive to your child's feelings," says Suzie Hayman, trustee of the national charity ParentlinePlus. "Young children are very free and easy, but most go through a modest phase after attending nursery school. Teenagers can find it very embarrassing if their parents are prancing about in the nude because of the whole idea of the opposite sex." Be sensitive, but also positive.

As Hayman says: "What's most important is to pass on the idea that 'My body is OK' and 'Whatever I am is fine', because the opposite message is so very harmful." In these days of cosmetic surgery and airbrushed pictures, you can't emphasise too much that bodies come in all shapes and sizes. But don't feel you have to strip off to prove it. After all, as TS Eliot once nearly said, your children might not be able to bear that much reality.

The bare essentials:

Reasons to go nude

• It's natural

• It's the best way to clean the shower

• Fake tan dries more easily

• You don't need to buy dressing-gowns

Reasons to cover up

• It saves on heating bills

• You might embarrass the children

• Clothes express personality

• Mobile phones take pictures these days

Source: http://www.telegrap h.co.uk/educatio n/main.jhtml? xml=/education/ 2008/02/09/ enakedness109. xml