Is it Rude to Be Nude?
At what age should we exercise some bodily inhibition in front of our kids?
Scrolling through Instagram this week during my longest window of freedom (aka on the loo), I was stunned into engagement by a child psychologist posting about nudity. Apparently, the age when children should no longer be privy to parental privates is five. Well, that ship has sailed over here and now I’ve been slightly left reeling, because honestly, I didn’t even consider it as a thing to be aware of. At least not yet. Obviously, I wasn’t expecting to be sauntering around sans robe amongst teenage boys. But I hadn’t been prepared for this to be a consideration during infant school.
For anyone else equally non-plussed, this isn’t one random quack’s opinion, indeed there are countless experts on record saying that age 5-6 is when the boundaries on parental-child nakedness in the same space should start to be set. As an aside: why does nobody give you a list at birth of these child development deadlines? We get all this documentation about the colour of newborn poos, but nothing re: when it’s weird to still be doing things. Couldn’t they make the red book a little more instructional beyond the age of 18 months?
Nudity is such a complex and contradictory concept today. With porn culture embedded at every corner, dick pics threatening from every ‘allow all’ Air Drop and new generations steeped in sexual vocabulary, you’d think naked bodies had been fully unshackled from shame. But it’s hard to read where we stand culturally right now on nearly anything and when we start to layer the new era of sexual politics and nomenclature into the picture, the lines feel blurry. How does nudity even amongst adults fold into the post #metoo conversation around safe spaces, traumas and triggers? How does nudity tally with the well-reported rise in social conservativism? Psychologist Jean Twenge made the point her 2023 book Generations that twice as many American high schoolers identify as ‘very conservative’ in comparison to Gen X in the 80s and you can’t move on Instagram for trad wives. (For more on Gen Z traditional values and generational politics here). How does one bear one’s baps as the sands shift away -at least in some quarters – for progressive liberalism?
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