That’s my understanding. After all, a woman might be comfortable changing in front of her own sons, but not in front of an unrelated man changing with his daughters. And, I think that sometimes the family locker room is used by, say, a disabled adult man who needs his wife to help him get dressed, etc. Each family gets their own cubby to change and shower in. I think that the women who can bring their young boys (under 5) into the women’s locker room sometimes do so because otherwise, especially at busy times, they would have to wait for a place to change.
When our family toured the Y before we joined, the tour guide took us through there because it was the only way to get a mixed-sex group through together to see the pool. Since I have a daughter and no sons, that’s the only time I’ve ever been in there, but my husband says that he has used it with our daughter in the past.
The 18+ locker rooms were instituted later. When I started going there, the main men’s and women’s locker rooms actually had two rooms each, with doors that were left open in between. People must have asked for adults-only locker rooms, so they closed the doors and designated the smaller rooms to be adults-only. If this seems feasible in the OP’s gym, she might want to inquire.
I can’t say it’s a general fear, but we’ve already had 2 such accounts from male Dopers in the thread. So if it were a general fear, maybe it wouldn’t be an inaccurate one.
I realize little girls are kids, too. Actual pedophilia aside, I suspect most men would be fairly uncomfortable with little girls in their locker room. Even if a man were changing with a bunch of his best friends and family members who he absolutely knew were not pedophiles, he’d be pretty unlikely to bring his daughter in there beyond infancy. Sure, there’s the lingering fear of being accused of being a pedophile, but I don’t think that would explain all of their discomfort. Socialize kids to opposite-sex nudity within the nuclear family if you feel it’s appropriate. Random women of the world mostly don’t want to be a part of it.
not_alice, you seem to be making it the women’s fault if they don’t want their private changing rooms to be exempted from the rules of the culture we live in for the convenience of a parent.
Should a 3 year old be left by himself in a men’s locker room? Should a three year old be left by himself anywhere?
A woman who has a problem with a mother bringing a toddler into a changing room needs to get over herself. The kid doesn’t care, and the kid’s safety matters more than some people’s self-important puritanicalism.
What age is your earliest memory? Is it really necessary for your child’s early memory to include my butt?
Children don’t belong in a gym at all, unless it has child care, IMO.
I don’t go to a gym with a locker room (it’s in the building), and the last time I was in a gym locker room was college where there weren’t any little kids in locker rooms, so I’ve no experience myself. That said, I guess I don’t think it would matter to me. I change pretty fast, so it’s not like there’s a lot of time hanging out there for me. And they’re just little kids so I don’t think I’d care all that much.
Dio, I have to ask, have you ever brought your daughter into the men’s locker room? Because from other threads that really doesn’t sound like something you’d do. But yet we all should deal so that your wife can bring your son into ours?
I will say that at 3 years old I mostly do consider them infants/ toddlers and it wouldn’t bother me. But by 4-6, I think of that as a preschooler/ kindergartener and will take the word of male Dopers in this thread that some of them were at an impressionable age.
I read it as “They remembered the experience, they surely didn’t do anything remotely sexual at the time”. And I did not read anything that indicated that it hurt their sexual development in any way.
So what is the problem, even if we accept the anecdotes as data (and I thought at least one of them was a little snark/joking).
[/QUOTE]
Socialize kids to opposite-sex nudity within the nuclear family if you feel it’s appropriate. Random women of the world mostly don’t want to be a part of it.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know about “round the world”. But even so, people can’t think of an age appropriate thing to say to a 3 year old or his mom if something comes about?
I’d be more concerned about that as evidence of poor socialization/sexualization of adults than a 3 year old opposite sex kid in the locker room with a same sex parent.
I was thinking of one other poster who said that even 3 or 4 year olds would be a problem, and should be sent off on their own:
I guess he/she was thinking of a context where family rooms were always accessible, and I was thinking of a context where they weren’t.
Because, TBH, if family rooms are accessible then it’s really not an issue. If there are family rooms that are open and have the same facilities then families should use them and there’s no reason that they wouldn’t.
If families are in regular changing rooms then either there aren’t family changing rooms, or there are but they’re not open, or they’re open but are bad in some way (badly signposted; non-working showers, too far from pool, twenty feet of changing space allocated for just after the kids’ beginners swimming lesson). It’s not like parents want their kids to see other grown adults’ arses, no matter how bad they are - the parents, that is.
I think there may be a bit of a cultural issue here as when I was in Sweden and went to the local swimming pool for a sauna with my friend the men’s changing area was FULL of children of varying ages and genders. Everyone was naked, no-one really cared at all, and in fact the layout of the room barely even lent itself to any kind of enclosure at all. The showers weren’t so much communal as an area of the wall of the room with shower heads coming out of them! No-one was wearing towels either, people were just getting on with it (whether that be going into/out of the swimming area, showering and changing or using the sauna area).
It didn’t bother me, it didn’t seem to bother anyone else. True there weren’t any girls there who seemed older than about 7 or so, but the number of them suggested to me that the changing rooms were themselves considered family areas and they were there with fathers. Sure, I know Scandinavia and America are pretty much poles apart when it comes to public nudity, but I still think it’s a comparison worth making. It certainly struck me as a Brit as I’ve never seen an opposite-sex child in a male changing area, and I imagine most Brits would feel the same as the US posters.
I’d say once they are old enough to dress themselves completely and correctly (for most children I know, that’s about age 6, and I don’t mean the clothes are straight but just things like “front side forward most of the time”), the kid should go to the gender-appropriate locker room. In case of problems handling the locks or somesuch, most people will be perfectly happy to lend a kid a hand.
This is whether there are “family rooms” or not: if you don’t trust your 6yo to be out of your sight for 10 minutes and the kid doesn’t have medical issues, you’re creating a future job for a shrink.
This is, with some modification, more or less how it works here. The dressing rooms for the local swimming pool are long narrow rooms with benches along each side and hooks along the wall. They open into a hallway which leads to a large tiled room with about 15 shower heads sticking out of the wall. In theory, two of the dressing rooms are for males and two are for females. The preponderance of the people using the dressing room will be of the designated gender, but nothing like all of them. It’s usually around 60%, the other 40 % are parents with their kids, or friends waiting on their friends.
About half the people in the shower room are wearing swimsuits at any given time.
There are stalls for dressing on the other side of the hallway where one could dress in private and leave one’s clothes hanging, and there are pay lockers next to them. The only people I have ever seen using them are muslims – or at least I assume so from the clothes and swimsuits.
The same dressing room setup is to be found at the gym where my kids have karate, where there are nominally male and female dressing rooms but the moms march right into the boys’dressing room with their sons and the dads with their daughters. And now that I think of it, at footie the girls and boys only have one dressing room on mixed teams (both my kids were on mixed teams; I have only seen boys and girls teams in our league at about 15 years old or so) and parents of both genders are usually there also.
There may be other rules where the primary objective is for the adults to change and the kids are just along for the ride, but I haven’t been in that situation yet.
I had no idea some people were so uncomfortable with the idea of non-sexual nudity. I’d only worry if the kid was in the 9-10 age range.
5 year old boys in the ladies’ locker room- fine with me, but then I’m cool with topless beaches.
Not so keen on the idea of little girls in the mens’ locker room, but that’s more about the atmosphere of sweaty masculinity, blue language and concerns about hygiene and cleanliness than about my daughter seeing nude men.
More and more places here are going for “changing villages”- unisex changing rooms with enough cubicles for everyone to get changed in, some super-sized for parents with kids, and nudity banned in the public areas. All showers are cubicled.
I’m not talking about people having their toddlers in the changing room; I’m talking about women bringing their older sons into the women’s changing room. As I’ve said more than once in this thread, the culture in Canada is for not having men or boys older than toddlers in the women’s changing room. I really don’t care what they’re doing in Europe or the UK in this respect; I’m talking about my local Y.
This is starting to feel like those discussions about shoes off in the house. I keep saying that in my culture we don’t wear shoes in the house, and people keep coming in to tell me why my culture is wrong and stupid.
Are you kidding? Most parents won’t let their kids go 3 arms length away in a supermarket, and you would sent them to a locker room full of naked strangers alone, and then suggest they ask for help when they need it?
Bizarre world we live in
Probably, but then this is the same person that objects to the kid seeing them naked, but wouldn’t mind the kid seeing some other people naked? I think the shrink is already plenty busy with those folks
I live in Canada, and I wasn’t aware that in our culture 3-5 year old boys were not allowed in a woman’s change room. I’m a guy, and a man taking a 5 year old girl in with him wouldn’t raise my ire.
Absent a family change room (and I understand that there was one in the OP), that would seem to rule out moms taking their boys to the pool (or dads taking their girls), given that many 3-5 year olds cannot work the lockers on their own, or be expected to reliably deposit and retrieve their belongings without supervision.
Seems to me this isn’t so much a clash of cultures, as a clash of values within one culture. I just don’t see the great value in modesty vis. a young child. What exactly is the harm of having a 4 year old boy look at you?
It is exactly like the shoes on/off discussion. It is surprising however how quickly one switches from one to the other. I have lived in Holland all of five years and when we visit the US, I have to pay attention to where my sons drop trou because their internal radar of appropriateness just is not activated at the appropriate times. This does not surprise me – what does surprise me is that mine isn’t either, I now have to remember to pay attention to who is aroudn when they are changing and so on.
