Clothing hides and therefore creates mystery and ignorance about natural body processes, such as pregnancy, adolescence, and aging. The more society muffles the human body in clothes, camouflages pregnancy and hides breast feeding, the more individual and bizarre will be the child's attempts to understand, to piece together a very imperfect knowledge of the life-cycle of the two sexes and an understanding of the particular state of maturity of his or her body. Clothing hides the natural diversity of human body shapes and sizes. When people are never exposed to nudity, they grow up with misunderstandings and unrealistic expectations about the body based on biased or misinformed sources, for instance, from advertising or mass media. Shame, with respect to nudity, is relative to individual situations and customs, not absolute.
True naturists emphasize a decent, family atmosphere and morality.
They feel better about their bodies, and more comfortable with their sexuality. Furthermore, naturist children showed a significantly higher acceptance of their bodies as a whole, rather than feeling ashamed of certain parts. They concluded that children who had seen their parents nude were more comfortable with physical contact and affection, had higher self-esteem, and showed increased acceptance of and comfort with their bodies and their sexuality. Research also has found that individuals with less childhood exposure to parental nudity experienced significantly higher levels of adult sexual anxiety than did the group with more childhood exposure to parental nudity. This site features Nudity,Peoples at Nude Beaches and Nudism.