My four-year-old daughter rushed up to me yesterday with a picture she'd drawn of a mermaid. But make no mistake-- this wasn't Ariel. This was a buxom sea-princess swimming completely topless through the ocean. I couldn't help but blush when she showed it to me. While I am completely supportive of nude art, my first instinct was to feel uncomfortable with the idea of a preschooler creating nude art.
Nude artwork is neither taboo nor unfamiliar to me. When I was nineteen, I worked full-time as a model for art classes at a local college and became fully accustomed to the idea that nudity, particularly in art, is non-sexual. I've walked through college hallways where painting after painting exposed my body to any onlookers. Comfort with artistic nudity was a necessity at the time; I wouldn't have had a job without it.
To me, nudity became something not associated with sex or obscenity, but a completely normal state of the human body. The parts we typically consider "vulgar" seemed no different than toes, arms, ears or any other features of human anatomy. Breasts were body parts made for feeding babies; butt-cheeks were made for sitting. Even the most intimate parts of the human body seemed innocent and normal as my job desensitized me to our assumptions about nudity and sexuality.
But, fast forwarding five years, it still somehow made me feel uncomfortable to realize that my daughter, no doubt influenced by the tasteful nude artwork on our walls, had taken the liberty to place a pair of fully exposed breasts on her own sketches of mermaids. While I may feel comfortable with nudity in artwork, I had the feeling that this sort of art might not work out so well if she repeated it in preschool-- and the feeling that I had somehow made a mistake by allowing my daughter to see nude artwork.
When it came down to it, though, I realized that there's no harm whatsoever in my daughter's admiration for the human form. For a four-year-old to draw women with exposed breasts "because it's prettier that way" isn't to deprive her of innocence, but to allow her to maintain it. To my child, boobs are a body-part made for feeding babies and women look pretty when they're not hiding them. Her drawings are as innocent in that respect as her doodles of mama-cats nursing their kittens or of daddies carrying their babies.
After talking to several other parents, I decided to continue encouraging my daughter's artistic endeavors and to continue leaving nude artwork hanging on our walls. Plenty of my friends have raised happy, healthy kids who both saw and created nude art in early childhood. However, given the reaction that others may have to her artistic interests, I've explained to my daughter that she shouldn't draw nudes in school because it could disrupt the class and upset her teacher. As with many other issues in parenthood, the biggest challenge isn't teaching my child what I believe, but teaching her to be respectful and mindful of the fact that others may think differently.
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