# Clothing Optional



## Saila (Jan 3, 2016)

Hello everyone, I am new to the forum. I am not very good with introductions so I thought I would just post something to start with. Here goes.

Nudity doesn't bother me, actually I enjoy not wearing any clothing at home and often choose not to.

Our son is 3, it doesn't bother him either and we will probably let him be naked once he finishes potty training.

I am worried though that as our son gets older he won't be able to keep the clothing-optional-home information to himself. Don't get me wrong we wouldn't lie about it if asked but we don't just tell people, it stays within our family.

I don't think he would purposely tell anyone but it could happen accidentally and some see nudity very negatively.

I see the possibility of a situation where we would have to explain, I don't feel that we should have to and would really like to avoid it.

So I am posting this here to get some opinions and persepctives from others. What do you think?

Talk with him, explain, trust and accept the risk?

Or, change to a clothing-required house and go back to optional when he is older?


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## EnviroBecca (Jun 5, 2002)

My parents had this kind of attitude. It was the 1970s when nudism was a somewhat popular idea overall, but we lived in a conservative small town in the Bible Belt. By age 3 I was well aware that other families were not so casual about nudity. (Maybe your son doesn't play at other kids' homes as often as I did?) 

It became a minor problem for me in kindergarten, when one day during free-play time I was telling a friend some kind of story about something that happened in the middle of the night and mentioned that I had been naked at the time. She was shocked, "WHY?!" I said I just hadn't felt like wearing pajamas. She said, "Kids can't sleep naked! Grown-ups sometimes do, but not kids." (My guess is that at some point she'd come into her parents' room in the middle of the night when they'd fallen asleep after sex.) Then she told somebody else, "Becca sleeps naked," and it was something I got teased about for a week or so before they got tired of it. This was a kindergarten in which even saying the word "underwear" could make everyone giggle.

But that wasn't a terrible experience, only kind of annoying, and it was enough to teach me that I'd better not mention my family's nudity to my peers.

A bigger problem for me was that my parents felt that my two closest friends, who were over at my house for several hours a week, were like members of the family, so they didn't bother to get dressed or close the bathroom door when those friends were over. Because my friends' parents didn't walk around naked or leave the bathroom door open ever, they were kind of freaked out by this and also super-curious about getting a good look at naked adults. It was awkward.

I think you should tell your son something like, "Different people have different feelings about privacy and seeing each other's bodies. In our family, it is okay to be naked around the house when we don't have guests, but some families do not do this. When you are visiting someone, never take off your clothes where they can see unless they have told you or shown you that it's okay in their house. Some people feel like naked bodies are really yucky, so it is better not to talk about being naked, at least to people you don't know very well."


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## beachmom5 (Dec 8, 2012)

*Our house*

I've always been very casual about nudity, but my husband has always been very conservative about it. As my husband never spent as much time with our kids, the kids seem to have inherited my openness and the times he voiced an objection to it, we more or less patronized him for the moment and tried to behave ourselves around him. The boys have always peed in the yard, off the boat and such, so they've never been shy around myself or their sister. And while I've allowed our daughter to sunbath topless, dad has never encountered that, but I'm certain he'd object. Each family is different.


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