Say he came to this country to work, he has six kids at home, and he runs around naked in front of them all the time.

How would that be?

And how does the "good mom" LW know just how her 10-year-old son feels? And what is she getting out of her exhibitionism?

As long as you don't hit on your kids, I see no problem with it. For me, it wasn't my parents going to nudist camps that was the problem, it was my father asking if he could feel me up at 12. Oh, and disclosing that we went to nudist camps to my extremely physically mature girlfriend when I was in 6th grade. It's not the nudity, it's the lack of boundaries. And, the confusion caused by living in two worlds where what passes for acceptable in one is deemed highly taboo in the other.

. . . and now my sister and I are VERY modest. I'm not sure why, but I think her nudity really embarrassed us. Maybe it was just the area we lived-- Southern, conservative, traditional (but not oppressively so). I remember being in gym class and in sports in high school and NEVER seeing another girl naked. In fact, we devised all kinds of ways to undress, put on our uniforms or street clothes right in front of each other without ever revealing our private parts.

Today, it offends me when women walk around buck-ass naked in the locker room. I was actually surprised the first time I saw it and thought it was about the rudest thing I'd ever seen. I had no idea that other people were comfortable being naked around strangers.

Not that I think it's necessarily wrong for LW to be naked in front of her kids. She just should be aware that making her kids uncomfortable is a possibility.

If your son's already 10, I think, realistically, you're approaching the limit of appropriateness in being naked in front of him.

BUT I think that in the most nonjudgemental way that I know how. I think nudity's all about context. You sound like you've modeled (no pun intended) nudity as a natural and incidental part of life and feeling comfortable with one's body. In a very non-obscene or gratuitous way, as nothing to be ashamed of.

That's not what Britney's doing.

But the only thing that makes me really worried is if/how/when your son talks about this in front of other people. It's if he says something about it that he thinks is no big deal, and some stranger/teacher/joeblow hears it out of context, that I'd worry about the authorities getting called.

I hate to ever say that you should bow to cultural pressure in your private life concerning norms you don't agree with...but that's what I'd realistically be afraid of.

No matter what your beliefs about the appropriateness of parents being nude in front of their children, I think that putting the burden on the children to tell their parents (or subtly indicate) that they would prefer that their parents stop being nude around the house is unfair. If you have raised your kids so that parental nudity is normal, your kids are likely to feel that they are contradicting your beliefs by feeling uncomfortable with the situation and might not verbalize it, not to mention the general awkwardness kids naturally feel around this whole area once they hit puberty. Nor will the kids necessarily know what subtle cues they should be sending to indicate that they prefer that the household change its pattern.

I urge you not to put your kids on the spot and to start covering up at home a bit (as someone else noted, with light robes or the like if comfort is the issue) as they start hitting middle school or whatever age boys stop thinking girls are icky and girls start giggling about boys. Personal beliefs about the healthiness and naturalness of nudity are one thing but the contrast between that and cultural norms, and your own desire to educate adolescents about body modesty and privacy, need to be taken into account.

I think that the psychologists may also be factoring in the unusually large number of people outside of the home who see Britney's ladybits and the fact that the pictures will always be a Google away.

Cover up. I'm no prude but I don't think that you should wait until your kid asks you to do it. He probably won't tell you about it the instant he feels uncomfortable, he'll wait until it's unbearable and it's during that time between uncomfortable and unbearable that he'll likely become a bit messed up about it.

It's not a matter of the nudity in a vacuum, it's nudity in a country and culture where it's equated with sexuality (and sexual dysfunction). Going with the grain sucks sometimes but this is the culture that he'll grow up in, the culture that will help him form his ideals. Yes, home life moulds children too, but this is not simply a lifestyle preference for most of the country, some of them will see this as abuse. The conflict between what you do in your home and the societal norm will be huge, he might not be able to handle it.

The easiest thing to do is throw on a robe. By walking around nude you may be teaching them to be comfortable with their bodies, but are you teaching them to be respectful of the bodies of others? Will they know that some questions are inappropriate and that there is a time and place for that sort of behaviour?

This is just another sign of an overblown worry caused, as Cary implies, by an overblown media, paid to overblow the underblown to blow a little money into their coffers. Being new to reading Cary's wonderful column, it has not escaped me that many people write in already knowing the answer to their question deep inside of themselves. It seems to me our overblown media concentrates on things so insignificant and tells us that we need to be afraid of life in so many instances, in such a shallow way, that many are either perennialy unsure of themselves, or have lost the map to get to their insides where these answers they already have, lay quietly.

if seeing one's parents nude pushed kids, automatically, towards anti-social behaviors later in life, wouldn't all those offspring who's 60's, hippie 'rents dragged them along to the nudist colony outings be commiting cross country mayhem as I write? Wouldn't half of europe be raping and pillaging one another on a grand scale. Because isn't it all about the pervasive attitude a given society places on a peticular behavior, such as nudity? If we are told daily to see danger there, we will begin to see it. But I bet this woman, who is intelligent enough to read and trust this column, already knows herself, if she looks inside herself, whether or not her actions are right or wrong where her own kids are concerned.