Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #886867 in Books
• Published on: 1986-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 221 pages

Customer Reviews

A Bombshell of a Read!
This book's a bombshell! It's the first (five year) study into the effects of social nudity (they use this word purposefully, for many of the people surveyed were raised in a clothing-optional environment but never were into nudism per se) on children growing up. I anticipated some good reading and to say I wasn't disappointed, would be a gross understatement.

This is a compelling book. Here is a carefully constructed survey that puts down in black-and-white the facts about children who grew up within nudism/naturism.

What The Naked Child has to say about the prevalent thinking about nudity in our society regarding the rearing of children is telling. The author also gives a brief history of clothing taboos as well - very informative and edifying.

A great deal of the content is given over to interviews with children reared in clothing-optional homes and covered such topics as attitudes toward nudity, sexual histories and predilections and relationships with parents. Many probing, frank questions were asked of each respondent to get a feel for each person's unique experiences.

As far as I'm concerned, this book is powerful stuff and a key book in any library. Though the authors freely admit that it only scratches the surface of the subject, the material covered already trashes the so-called "experts" unfounded, unverified suppositions that nudity around kids is inherently harmful.

If you've been looking for information to counter the prattling of doctors, teachers, church leaders, parents and relatives against raising kids in a socially nude environment, this book's the one to read. You'll thank yourself for taking the time. Trust me on this - you won't be disappointed.

Refreshing and remarkable it hasn't been banned.
This book was published before the Terror and contains beautiful, uncensored text and photos. There is no similar work available in English on the important subject of nudity and shame. While not as scholarly as Hans Peter Duerr's "Nudity and Shame: the myth of the civilizing process" (in German), this book offers welcome balance to the mass hysteria over child sexuality in the U.S. The fanatics haven't yet targeted this book for burning so read it before books like this are silenced forever.

Easy, enjoyable read; serious consideration given
From the preface (which I think is very well written):

"Does exposure to nudity cause sexual hang-ups in children? Will an open physical environment have negative effects on the personalities and sexual development of young people? Will seeing their parents nude cause children to develop what some experts call an over-balanced attachment to mother and father, and seduction anxiety? Or, as other experts believe, will nude experiences in the physically open family inevitably lead to incest, create terrible guilts and frustrations, and arouse parent-child rivalries? Will the children in families where nudity is common be the victims of more school failures and posess more sexual obsessions than those reared in families where nudity is not allowed? [...]

"[This] is the report on a study which addresses the questions listed above and gives the reader a chance to compare the opinions of the experts with the real-life experiences of adults who grew up in open physical environments. This book is the result of five years of research and writing plus added years for follow-up on some of the cases. _Growing Up Without Shame_ represents the first systematic attempt at studying the effects of a physically open environment. We know this study is the first. We hope it is not the last."

I found this book an easy, enjoyable read; it appears to give serious consideration to the topic, reviewing experts' opinions and researching the views of people who grew up in open environments. A more technical examination of the data from the research is given in an appendix.

Also contains a number of b&w photos from nudist environments, although these photos seem purely to brighten up the pages, since they have no direct connection to the text where they are placed.