FatherHood Friday

Something Naked This Way Comes

Nude: unclothed, undressed,nude, stripped,unclad, disrobed, unrobed, divested, leafless, hairless, bare, undraped, exposed, ungarmented, having nothing on, in dishabille, unappareled, denuded, unveiled,uncovered, uncloaked, stark-naked, bald,bareheaded,barren,dismantled, au naturel, mother naked, buck naked, in the altogether, in one's birthday suit, in the buff, peeled*, without a stitch, in the raw, topless, bottomless, not decent, in a state of nature, starkers

Anyone with children over the age of one is familiar with the phenomenon of the defiantly naked child. You probably have one of them... The child that disrobes in the grocery story while you pick cereal. The child that appears beside you in his birthday suit when you open the door for the UPS man. The child that isn't allowed to visit the grandparents until she decides to wear something more than socks on her hands.
Yeah...that child.
I feel your pain.

My teenager daughter is kind of weird, she does everything by the book, so she was not good as any sort of preparedness training for the ones that came after her. She never cried, liked baths, brushed her teeth, never had a temper tantrum, and kept her clothes on.
The next two arrived "normal". They screamed, they spit, they bit, they played with poop, and they both had a dedication to erratic statement making nudity that hasn't been seen since Haight-Ashbury in the sixties.

Liam was constantly being sighted naked in the yard peeing behind a tree. (The tree thing a trick he learned from his Texan grandpa.) Fallon used to dread coming home on the school bus because invariably her two year old brother was out in the yard at one with nature. The school bus driver referred to the stop as "The one by that naked kid's house".
A year or so later he spent less time in the yard but was more inclined to strip without warning in public. Most memorably he removed his dragon costume in Walmart on Halloween, offering the full monty to the greeters and all the children begging candy.
He outgrew this tendency when his sister Isabel, a natural born competitor, got old enough to give him a run for his money.

She was so dedicatedly manically, obsessively naked that we feared for her job opportunities later in life. Still at the age of three she takes off everything the minute we hit the front door on our way back from errands, and she has to be maneuvered into anything more than a pair of panties as deftly as a SWAT team disarms a bomb.

I have heard other parents talk of this problem, but my children took it to such heights that I wondered if maybe I was doing something wrong. I mean I loved watching Saturday morning cartoons in my underoos as a kid but I never peed in the yard.

So I looked into it and this is what I learned.
It is estimated that humans have been wearing clothing for 650,000 years.
In a 1995 review of the literature, Paul Okami concluded that there was no reliable evidence linking exposure to parental nudity to any negative effect. Three years later, his team finished an 18-year longitudinal study that showed that, if anything, such exposure was associated with slight beneficial effects, particularly for boys.
In modern Liberia soldiers under"General Butt Naked" Joshua Blahyi, fought naked in order to terrorize their opponents.
Most doctors refer to the habit of young children undressing as "perfectly normal" although one Ph D did allude to the potential problem of "tactile defensiveness", whatever that is.
Child therapist Kimberly Clayton Blaine says, “It’s perfectly normal for toddlers to undress themselves and resist clothing-it’s just a way to assert their independence from Mom and Dad and show they have their own opinions and abilities”. This is the age when toddlers just want to be independent and test their boundaries.
So it seems to be a control issue...maybe this means my children just needed to assert themselves a bit more than others.

Certainly asserting oneself through nudity can only be healthy right?

I have opinions and abilities. Am I suppressing them by wearing clothes? Am I giving my kids a complex by keeping myself covered? Am I damaging them by being self conscience about the naked human body, bodies that they so freely and joyfully parade around in?

I have to admit I envy their freedom sometimes. It does feel good to run around naked feeling the sun and wind on every inch of tender exposed flesh. How do I teach them that the body is wonderful and perfectly agreeable...until it isn't?

One Stanford University study from the 1980s found that children in the United States develop a sense of modesty somewhere between the ages of 4 and 8 (and sooner for kids with an older sibling to emulate). So it seems that we have an innate need for privacy that arises about the time it is prudent to have it.
So until that awareness creeps in, neither their nudity or yours should be a cause for concern.
Maybe all I need to do is remember the joy of fewer rules and a body that I am comfortable living in, with or without clothes.

So if you look out your windows this weekend you probably won't see me running through the grass in the altogether, but if you knock on the door, you might just catch me watching cartoons in my underwear.