The Naked Child Growing Up Without Shame
<< Preface >>
Dennis Craig Smith and Dr. William Sparks

    Does exposure to nudity cause sexual hang-ups in children? Will an open physical environment have negative effects on the personalities and sexual development of young people? Will seeing their parents nude cause children to develop what some experts call an over-balanced attachment to mother and father, and seduction anxiety? Or, as other experts believe, will nude experiences in the physically open family inevitably lead to incest, create terrible guilts and frustrations, and arouse parent-child rivalries? Will the children in families where nudity is common be the victims of more school failures and possess more sexual obsessions than those reared in families where nudity is not allowed?

    In many homes today, parents are abandoning the Victorian-based notions of modesty and are far more relaxed about members of the family seeing each other nude. At the same time, an increasing number of authorities are writing about and warning of the grave consequences for the children of physically freer families. The issue is simple. If the dire results they foresee can be proven to be inevitable — or even possible in most cases — the warnings should be heeded. But if they cannot be proven through evidence, we should speak out against them.
    What are the consequences they predict? Are they legitimate threats to your children’s mental and emotional health? Are you harming your children emotionally if you allow them to casually see you nude during their pre-adolescent and adolescent years? Surprisingly, in spite of the scientific requirement of proof, these “experts” offer little more than personal experience or theory to back their claims.
    For this reason, Growing Up Without Shame was written. Within the following pages is the report on a study which addresses the questions listed above and gives the reader a chance to compare the opinions of the experts with the real-life experiences of adults who grew up in open physical environments and attitudes about immodesty. This book is the result of five years of research and writing plus added years for follow-up on some of the cases. Growing Up Without Shame represents the first systematic attempt at studying the effects of a physically open environment. We know this study is the first. We hope it is not the last.


Introduction

    Small children completely lack a sense of modesty. Infants feel no compunction about and against exploring all parts of their bodies and exposing themselves to others’ view. They have no instinctive negative attitudes about the bodies they were born with. This they must learn from older, “wiser” generations.

    Because we, as a society, are becoming daily more aware of the importance of a good self-image, we tell our children to feel good about themselves, to feel good about who and what they are, but we quickly forget that the persons they are contain the very items we tell them not to touch, not to talk about and certainly not to show to others. A child learns very quickly what it is about him or her that has been set upon by the curse of indecency: the offending parts guilty by association in the conspiracy of original sin. It seems that if a child is to feel good about him/herself then he must feel good about all his parts and all his body functions. Either sex, whatever age, a child must, should feel that his/her body is not innately guilty of any or some shameful, unspeakable crime against decency.
    So we tell our children their bodies are good, created in holiness, by God. But we are not consistent. In the same breath we tell them that there are parts of themselves that are shameful. These parts are sinful to have exposed and must never be exposed in the presence of others, other people — even though those other people have the very same parts, created in the very same way. The very names of those parts are taboo.

    To emphasize the unspeakable nature of those portions of our bodies, we create a vocabulary of phrases and use special words. We say down there, and my thing, “unmentionables”, never penis or vagina. When speaking of the functions of those organs, we are equally hesitant to speak openly. Down there is dirty. We need to go to the bathroom, we don’t need to urinate. Jokes with references to sex or elimination are called dirty jokes, “bad words”. All references to those sinful, evil segments of ourselves are treated differently than are references to our hands or feet or heads: “nasty”, “shame on you”.
    All these euphemisms, these substitute words and phrases, have to do with our sex organs or their functions. They speak loudly to children, making it clear that, despite anything adults may say to the contrary, the human body is not all good. There are certain portions that are distasteful and offensive. The impression children get is that many adults wish to pretend that those parts do not even exist
    The author has undertaken this study to bring common sense into this issue. We cannot allow the contradiction that exists between what we say on one hand, and what we do and demand in behavior on the other, to continue if we wish to give our children positive attitudes toward themselves. We must reach some accord between what seems to be a very basic and logical approach to giving children positive feelings about their physical reality and self-worth and what appears in the literature on raising children which warns against the “dangers” of exposing them to nakedness: specifically, the nakedness of adults during the children’s pre-adolescent and adolescent years. To reach this accord, we set out to discover whether the dire results some authorities warn  about and against would occur, at least have occurred in any significant number of nudist children; and if the effects, when they did occur, had anything to do with, any relationship to the fact that the children saw their parents nude.
    In reviewing the literature, we found only speculations. What we found were examples of what authors (usually psychiatrists or psychologists) had interpreted as a cause-and-effect relationship in one of his or her patient’s experience. Words like obviously resentful, and terrible guilts and frustrations, were used to describe what had resulted from what these authors read as “overstimulation, caused to the children by their viewing their parents’ genitals and becoming sexually attracted to their parents.” We wanted to know if the attraction to the parents was greater among nudist children than is normal and to be expected, and if the viewing of the genitals caused more sexual attraction than the overall physical and mental personality of the parent. Was it the nakedness that caused the arousal, or the mystery and forbidden nature of sexual matters?.
    We hoped through this investigation to determine whether sexual problems and precocious sexual arousal were caused by nakedness in the family or by the mystery and taboos that surround sexual matters in non-nudist homes. Child psychologists, pediatricians, the writers of newspaper advice, television talk-show experts and neo-Freudian psychiatrists tell us of the grave consequences of nudity in the home. But are the consequences inevitable? Are they even real? How often, if at all, do nudist children show these distressing symptoms? We could get no data that answered those questions.
    It seemed the only way to learn the truth, to find out about these beliefs was to interview, to test them with adults who had grown up in families where this kind of exposure to human anatomy existed. We devised an interview procedure that would look into their social lives, their sex lives, and their self-concepts. When we had accumulated enough facts through these interviews we could determine what evidence existed to indicate that psychological problems were caused by early knowledge (first-hand) of other people’s bodies. Only then could we see if there was any real correlation between what was believed and what was actually happening. Only then could we get reliable answers to at least a good number of the questions all conscientious parents, nudist and non-nudist alike, are certain to ask.
    These questions are important for they deal with very vital aspects of child rearing. Will childhood experiences in a nude family warp the personalities of children? Does the nudist lifestyle, or a very open “immodest” home environment, cause children to become frustrated, burdened with anxiety, and over-stimulated? For that matter, what is overstimulation and how is it measured?

    We used three methods of gathering subjects. We advertised in numerous publications we knew were read by nudists, we visited various nudist clubs and camps, and we drew on personal knowledge and contacts made during the research. Through our advertising, we received responses from Canada, Australia, Germany, England, and throughout the United States. During our visits to nudist camps we were able to tape interviews with a number of the individuals who had responded to our ads. At such times, we completed in-depth questionnaires dealing with their lives and backgrounds. As time passed, one other source became available to us.  The involvement into The Free Beach Movement has given us a good supply of contacts, although most of the people in this group were not raised in nudist families with this attitude but became nudists through the influence of friends or relatives.
    We are indebted to the many people whose help has been greatly appreciated and without whom this research could never have been conducted. First of all, we wish to thank those who answered our ads, who consented to taped interviews, or who agreed to fill out the very personal, sometimes bothersome questionnaires. Thanks also go to the members of the staff of the Bare in Mind nudist newspaper and its publishers, Reg and Thelma Manning. They supported and cooperated with us from the very beginning when nearly everyone else was too skeptical to take an interest in or believe in what we were doing. We want to thank Nada O’Connell, who — with Thelma — was the first nudist contact we made, and whose enthusiastic endorsement and encouragement made things easier during a very difficult beginning.
    We owe much to the members and management of the nudist clubs we visited during our research — Glen Eden Sun Club, Olive Dell Ranch, Samagatuma Nudist Resort, The Swallows, and the Treehouse Fun Ranch, as well as to the many travel clubs and free-beach groups who assisted us in contacting subjects and gathering data for our study. We are deeply indebted to the trustees of the American Sunbathing Association and its branch, the Western Sunbathing Association, and to Ed Lange, Jackie Davison, and Jason Loam of the Elysium Institute in Los Angeles, California.
    Special appreciation must go to Candice Kurstin-Young, who helped set up the framework of the research questionnaire. She provided advice and guidance throughout the length of the project. Other friends also deserve special thanks for their support from the very first time the idea was broached. Of these, Dr. Lou Pippin of California Polytechnic State University at San Louis Obispo, was a particularly helpful advisor and consultant who did much to keep our enthusiasm up and our frustrations down; all of the many people who answered the ads, consented to do taped interviews or have agreed to fill out the very personal, sometimes bothersome questionnaire; and finally and most important, we wish to thank Barbara Bolton, who has assisted in organizing the entire project, who has traveled extensively to do interviews, make contacts and do needed research, and whom these authors consider a close and most valuable associate.


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