My parents were extremely conventional, especially when they worried about what the neighbors thought. Our lawn was always mowed, the weeds were always hoed, and as children, we were not even allowed to run around with runny noses. We always had red noses from Mom wiping our noses.

As we got older two rules were really clear. What happened at home stayed at home, and we must look good for the neighbors. When I started dating, one thing my Dad absolutely hated was me parking in front of the house with a boyfriend and kissing or even just talking. What would the neighbors think! Naturally I tried to ignore him.

Once, I started out the evening with a girlfriend but ended the evening with my boyfriend. Then we parked in front of the house.

My Dad, a light sleeper was furious. He kicked my Mom out of bed and told her to go get me in the house. My Mom is a rather heavy sleeper and a slow waker-upper. Imagine my astonishment when my mother stumbled out of the house in the light of a full moon wearing an extremely sheer nightie. She walked over to the car and mumbled: "Your Dad said that you should come in right now!" Then her eyes got quite wide when she realized that I was with my boyfriend and not the girl I left off with. She quickly went back into the house.

I could have died. Nobody wants her boyfriend to see her mother's titties.

My Mom told me later that she was so still asleep that she didn't even realize what she was wearing.

Kids may get pretty wild and unconventional themselves, but they mostly want their parents to be conforming and ordinary. In fact, there is a time when they are about 14 that parents are such an embarrassment that they act as if they wish you didn't exist at all.

Undressed like that, in front of her children, she was SO asking for it!

Begging for trouble, she was!

It seems to me that the effort to make sure the doors are locked and the kids safely on the other side before you strip to your underwear is probably going to teach your kids stranger things about sexuality than calmly undressing. My kids have seen me and my husband naked. Guess what? There's nothing sexual about it. There's nothing furtive, either. My kids never did the whispered 'I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours' thing, with all the giggles of the forbidden fruit.

In fact, I think my kids are healthier for seeing that despite all the whispers on elementary school playgrounds about "boobies" they really aren't that interesting.

My parents were prudes. My mother never managed to discuss menstruation, not to mention sex. I was lucky. I had an older sister. She was the one terrified by the horrible inexplicable thing happening to her body.

The thing is not whether your kids see you naked or not. It's whether you show and teach your kids healthy sensible ideas about the human body, nudity and sex.

LW, you sound healthy and sensible. Britney Spears is not. In fact, she's all over the papers because she is so spectacularly far from sensible.

It sounds as if the LW has done as much right as she can, even to the point of double checking her attitudes with the world at large.

From my own experience, LW, it is possible that your days of naturalness are going to end in a few years anyway when your first child, followed quickly by the second, becomes a teenager. The average teenager, which will include yours and their future friends, is known for a great deal of initial cluelessness and an innate ability to show up where they are not expected. So as you are strolling down the hall, in the nude, on your way to the bedroom, all the while thinking that your son and his guest are blissfully zoned out downstairs, watching TV, and POP!, there is the friend two feet away mumbling about needing to use the bathroom. How did he get there so fast! Who knows, it's a skill.

And it gets better. Even when you think you have the house to yourself, one of them will troop into the living room with a friend, or two friends, or whatever, two hours before they were due home, saying the movie was a bore, and they have no cash so they are going to fix something to eat. Believe me, I've been there. I've been "caught" in the middle of taking a cat's temperature, loudly arguing on the phone with a friend, running to the basement half-dressed to get the slacks I forgot were in the dryer, and drooling in my sleep on the couch. Be prepared.

I applaud you for raising your children according to your convictions and attitudes and raising children with an easy going attitude towards the human body. I was not raised that way, except in a more sideways respect. Since my parents loved art, from the age I was old enough to turn the pages of a book, I saw nudes in paintings, sculpture, statues, you name it. My parents never censored or put art books on the top shelf where I couldn't reach them. I know they knew I was looking at them because I heard the story of Michelangelo sculpting the "David" statue when I was in kindergarten, complete with illustrations. Having access to these books got me in trouble on more than a few occasions, especially when I would bring books to school with any number of nude women and men. Some teachers never batted an eye, but some teachers, and many fellow students would literally scream when they saw a 4th grader with such "smut." Funny thing though, I don't think anyone ever called out my parents about it. Good God, do you think it's possible people didn't go absolutely, ballistically batshit over stuff as much as we thought they did?

I did find a URL for a brief Slate article that addresses the Spears nudity issue, only for more normal parents. It's written with a Freudian viewpoint, and only makes a few points, but might be interesting to you.

http://www.slate.com/id/2174401/