* YOU BEEN SNAP * Why do we give children such confusing messages about their bodies?

*BY FLORA LYIMO DESIGNER*
 Last week, during one of the hottest Easter holidays on record in the UK, my three children and I went to the local park.
It was sweltering, and after an hour or so of running about with a football, my daughter, Phoebe, who has just turned 11, had turned into a sweaty, par-boiled lobster and desperately wanted to take her T-shirt off to cool down. But she didn’t.
When I asked her why on earth not, she said in an exasperated voice, as if I didn’t understand anything, ‘Mum, I can’t take my top off in a park. People will stare and point!’

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Liz Fraser believes that millions of children in Britain, have been indoctrinated with the idea that nakedness is rude, naughty or shameful

Once I’d picked my jaw up off the grass and tried to make sense of what she’d just said, I realised to my utter dismay that her fears were probably completely justified.
Where boys often take their tops off in the hot summer months, many girls, even as young and totally undeveloped as my younger daughter, already feel that they ‘shouldn’t’ expose their top halves in public. Because their nakedness is somehow . . . wrong.

To realise that my own daughter already feels this way came as a real shock to me. I was raised by parents  who never shied away from stripping off and jumping in a mountain lake or sunbathing topless on the beach, and I was never even aware of my own nakedness as a pre-pubescent girl. Naked or not — it made no difference to me. I felt totally free, and happy.
Now a parent myself, I’m trying to raise my children similarly: we are very comfortable with our own nakedness at home, and I still often share a bath with my younger children, both Phoebe and Charlie, who’s 7, and quite happily get undressed in front of them.
They see nothing strange about it at all, and the little ones aren’t shy about dancing around naked. They’re kids, after all!
But despite all this ease around nudity within the family environment, they have picked up on the message from outside our home that showing naked flesh in public is something unthinkable, even for children.

Liz Fraser tries to bring up her children to be comfortable with nudity, the way she was raised by her parents

They, like millions of children in Britain, have been indoctrinated with the idea that nakedness is rude, naughty or shameful — and that it’s always, always connected with sex.
Though the children are thankfully too young to know about such a gruesome thing, the public’s media-fuelled terror of paedophilia is now so strong that many parents don’t want their children to be seen naked by strangers ‘just in case’ they are photographed and put onto the internet, or peered at by sexual predators.
A naked child has become, for many, a potential sex abuse incident, rather than the beautiful, pure thing it is, despite the reality, which is that — mercifully — abuse by paedophiles is far less prevalent than the furore that surrounds them would imply.
Turning the clock back to the Seventies when I was a pre-schooler, hot summers were all about wearing almost nothing, and our photo albums are bursting with pictures of us as children, naked and happy.
There we’d all be in the local paddling pool or swimming pool, splashing and shrieking happily in nothing but our pants, and often not even that. And nobody minded at all.

Songs of innocence: 'Compare this [Britain] to other countries, where nudity is seen as part of life, and where children are raised without ever thinking to question it'

Then when I was ten we moved to the South of France for a while, and I remember everyone sunbathing topless, completely relaxed about it. Nobody thought about ‘covering up’ to hide their bodies.
In the local swimming pool, showers were communal and we’d all strip and get washed and changed side by side in the middle of the changing room, chatting away as we did so. Nobody stared. Nobody found it embarrassing or weird. It was considered as normal as brushing one’s teeth.
But when I came back to Britain the following year, the rules for girls my age seemed completely different to the ones abroad.  I found that in the changing rooms everyone locked themselves away in separate cubicles, to change in private, ashamed to let their nakedness be seen.  If they had to change on the beach they’d perform a bizarre hopping dance ritual under a towel, attempting to remove pants, while putting on bikini bottoms simultaneously, without showing an inch of Forbidden Flesh. Not even for a millisecond.
None of my friends swam or sunbathed topless. Instead, they hid themselves away, squeezing their pubescent breasts into bikinis whose purpose was, paradoxically, to make the wearer look sexier than if they had nothing on at all. It seemed that wearing sexy swimwear was OK, but to be naked and natural wasn’t. Which I found very confusing.
And to be honest, I still do. Beaches this summer will be full of toddlers wearing bikini tops. One mum I know impressed upon her daughter: ‘It’s to keep your boobies covered up.’ Her what?! She’s three years old!

'Public nudity is a crime here, and yet pornography and hypersexual advertising is everywhere in the UK and North America'

I always bought one-piece swimsuits or just bikini bottoms for my girls when they were little. Why would I want them to wear a bikini top that’s designed to cover breasts, which they quite clearly haven’t got?
Most damaging in all of this is the bizarre paradox that this whispering, blushing shunning of nakedness comes hand in hand with our culture’s obsession with sex and sexuality.
As a scientist friend of mine, and father of one, put it: ‘Public nudity is a crime here, and yet pornography and hypersexual advertising is everywhere in the UK and North America.
‘The ever-present appearance of sex and sexual messages in our culture and media goes along with fear and horror at actual nudity — and causes all kinds of problems for people’s sexual activity and self-confidence.’
When nudity is  considered unacceptable, but highly-charged sexual messages in advertising and pop videos are not, is it any surprise that so many children are growing up with a confused attitude to their bodies, or feeling ashamed to take their tops off in a park when they’re hot?
What’s even more extraordinary is that violence and bad language are tolerated far more liberally than nudity on television and in films, especially in the U.S. and UK.
Millions of children every day are sitting down to watch programmes that show grim acts of violence or aggression, yet when it comes to showing a naked breast in a shower the censors come down like a ton of bricks and insist it’s covered up, or blurred.
The message our children pick up is that blasting each other to pieces and using foul, aggressive, threatening language is fine and dandy, but showing a nipple? Perish the thought!
Compare this to other countries, where nudity is seen as part of life, and where children are raised without ever thinking to question it. One former classmate, who is Spanish and has a two-year-old daughter, commented: ‘Kids run around naked in Spain on beaches and in parks in the good weather and it’s totally normal.’
Another friend, who is Swedish, but now lives in Canada, told me: ‘Canada is on a par with the U.S. in terms of excessive prudishness. When we go to the beach, it’s the Swedish mums who let their toddlers run around naked — and they get lots of dirty looks from their Canadian counterparts!’
And so despite the fact that I appear to be in the distinct minority, I continue to fight hard against our very British culture of bizarre, unhelpful prudishness.I still change in the middle of the changing room at my local pool, without adopting body-shielding tactics. I know my children find this a little bit odd, and probably wish I didn’t. When nobody else is naked, why is Mummy?
Well, because Mummy happens to think that there’s nothing wrong with it and she’d rather teach her children that their bodies are beautiful and natural just as they are, and don’t need dressing up in sexy clothes or to be hidden from view to be acceptable.