Clothing-optional Home

This is a post I made on Facebook yesterday while it was making changes to its algorithm; I thought I had lost it.  But many of our followers found it and a few of them went ahead and messaged it to me (thank you Luci, Charlotte, and Amity!).  Thank you all for your support.  When Facebook was finally done making its changes, the 3 posts I made were there after all.  I still think this one is blog worthy, so here it is: 

 

Our younger children are fully embracing our clothing-optional home life. I would post pictures, but, well, they’re naked. I do wish we could be more free to post pictures of our children “au naturel” because their innocence serves as a great reminder that my hangups and shame associated with my own body – and nudity in general – are my own. And their little butts are just too cute!

And I do have my own issues. Though my views have changed a lot since having children, especially when it comes to children seeing other family members naked, my feelings and behavior have only changed a little. I am still not comfortable being naked around anyone. But, for the sake of my children, I don’t freak out if they walk in on me changing, or getting out of the shower.

Naturally, there are possible consequences to playing in your birthday suit in the house, and we discuss these often. For instance, we ask them how they would feel if their 4 yr old neighbor and friend came over to play and they were naked in our living room? There are times when we ask that they be naked somewhere that we don’t consider to be a common family space, and that they put clothes on for meals. But we are very careful to do so without using shame. My shame is my own. And I do not want them to be ashamed of their bodies, or even of being naked.

So we have naked children in my house this morning, playing with Legos, watering our little seedlings and spraying each other, and generally running around being innocently adorable. But I won’t be sharing any pictures with you.

How do you approach nudity in your house with your children? Have your views changed at all since having children? How do you deal with your own feelings of shame when it comes to parenting?

~ Jeremy

PS: do you know how screwed up our society is? I had to think and think about whether I could actually admit publicly that I think little kids’ butts are cute for fear of being labeled some kind of pedophile. There is a huge distrust of men when it comes to children. I hate that.

PPS: Here are some pics of my kids playing today (the day after I wrote the above post); granted, they;re not naked, but I still probably wouldn’t normally have posted this anywhere – my stance may be changing: