Parent Time

We cover up

To borrow a bit of Seinfeld’s pop-culture wisdom: “There’s good naked and bad naked.” And as a man in his forties still struggling to shake off images from my childhood of my mother naked in the washroom and around the house, I’d like to make a case that parenting in the buff falls in the latter category.

My mother was a tie-dyed-in-the-wool hippie, and used to appear nude in front of me and my brother and sister all the time. She’d frequently doff her towel, post-shower, and reach for her robe, chatting with one of us all the while. Or materialize on the stairs au naturel and ask if we’d done our homework. Or saunter across the living room in her birthday suit, like a slow-motion streaker.

Of course, I understand now what she was up to — the pedagogical content of all this in-house nude modelling. She didn’t want us to be ashamed of our bodies, or “uptight” or “hung up” when it came to sex and matters sexual. And, indeed, I did not. While in college, for example, my girlfriend Kate and I ran around a farmer’s field wearing nothing but our smiles, while a bunch of cows stared on with bovine indifference, chewing. It’s a beautiful, sunlit memory, one of the best of my life. Certainly, I am no prude. But with the onset of husband-hood and fatherhood, my view of public nudity narrowed at the same time as my experience of nudity’s power broadened.

My wife, Pam, was all for intra-familial nudity. And when our three boys were babies, it was fine. It felt good. But, according to a Stanford University study, kids develop a sense of modesty between ages four and eight (sooner if they have an older sibling). That’s about when each of our sons stopped asking for company in the washroom. That’s also when the sight of Nude Mom suddenly stopped them in their tracks. They would stare, transfixed, and ask all sorts of pointed questions. And it just didn’t feel right at all.

At about that same time they started to wince and cringe and beg me to put on some clothes if they happened to catch me undressed. I’m not sure why, but the sight of Nude Dad bothered them just as much. Rather than embarrass them even more by probing for an explanation, I simply honoured their requests. Anyway, I want them to remember me as I remember my own father: fully clothed. (He was more buttoned-up than my mother.)

The singer Christina Aguilera says motherhood won’t interfere with her “naked Sundays” with her husband. But that seems disingenuous, coming from someone who’s made millions and built up a whole career flashing her naughty bits all about. An unclothed parent may have benign intentions, but that cannot negate the fact that we as humans are programmed to equate nudity with sex.

“But nudity is natural,” my mother would say. Well, with all due respect to my mother, if nature had its way, all our teeth would fall out and we’d all die by age 30. That’s why we invented a little thing called civilization. In my view, the formula isn’t natural = good. It’s civilized = good. And respecting your kids’ privacy, and getting them to respect yours, is the civilized thing to do.

David Eddie is the author of Chump Change and Housebroken: Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad. He writes a blog at davideddie.com.

Originally published in Today's Parent, September 2009