I have seen naked toddlers in economically depressed rural areas. The whole point is that they’re NOT yet potty trained.
Mosquitoes
I have to agree this is a class issue. Letting your child run around peeing and pooping anywhere they like, like a dog, signals you are too poor to afford something more sanitary, or else you are just plumb lazy and don’t care if others step in your baby’s shit. Or put another way, “it’s trashy.”
I really don’t understand how letting un-potty trained children run naked in public places even works. If naked toddlers are the norm, are European beaches and parks littered with chunks of baby poop?
Never, ever see that in Taiwan.
Ironically, we have some friends who (like us) are a Taiwanese-American couple. Once in the US, after a day at the pool, the American dad thought it was the most natural thing in the world to let his toddler daughter strip out of her wet clingy bathing suit and walk bare-bottomed out through the parking lot to their car. The Taiwanese wife was absolutely mortified and walked about half a mile behind them so she wouldn’t be associated with her bumpkin American family.
Moms nursing in public is not really that uncommon (my wife has done it), but usually it’s done so discreetly that people don’t even notice it. Most women use cover-ups, sit in quiet, obscure corners. etc.
There are exceptions, though. A couple of weeks ago I took my kids to the Children’s Museum in St. Paul. I was sitting on a bench while they were fooling around inside the giant beehive watching them play, and after a few minutes, I happened to look over at two women sitting kitty corner to me noticed that one of them was casually nursing a baby while chatting with the other woman. It was unusual in that she wasn’t using any kind of blanket or cover-up, and that she was sitting right in the middle of a pretty bustling crowd. Funny thing is, she still didn’t seem to be drawing any notice. Kids and parents were walking right by her without a second look. I was actually kind of surprised that no one seemed to notice at all.
On the other hand, another woman was (illegally) thrown out of an Old Country Buffet up here not too long ago for nursing her baby at her table. A couple of morons complained, and the management was apparently unaware of the law.
Like others here, I’ve seen plenty of women nursing in public in the US. Naked toddlers, not as much but I seem to remember it being more common when I was a kid in the 70s.
That was in fact my primary hypothesis, but since I didn’t want to instantly reveal myself as another of those arrogant, USA-bashing snotty Europeans, I decided to not put the hypothesis forward in the OP 
(emphasis mine)
No, they aren’t. Y’know, it is possible to keep an eye on the child so that s/he doesn’t poop all over the place. “Like a dog”…
BTW, you probably won’t see many naked toddlers in city parks over here either. On the beach or on a front lawn even in middle-class suburban areas, though. And it actually helps a lot against those diaper rashes which aren’t exactly uncommon when it’s hot and the child sweats underneath the diaper
So you’ve chosen to ignore the posts that go against your hypothesis?
BTW, what about other parts of Europe? Do kids run around starkers in the UK, for example?
By definition, a non-potty trained child has no real control over their elimination so I really don’t see how “keeping an eye on them” helps anything. So a parent “keeps an eye” on the child. The child, quite innocent of social norms at this point, squats to poop in the sandbox. What does the parent do? Catch it in their hands?
I suspect that actually the norm is that potty trained children are let to run naked in public places. The alternative honestly makes no sense and presents an obvious public health risk. I know in India children are potty trained to some degree at an extremely young age (by US standards), as is rather sensible for cultures where nakedness would be far more typical for young children.
I have a picture of myself nursing a toddler, which I treasure. He’s nursing and playing with a toy car at the same time. It’s an interesting photo because unless you know ahead of time that he’s nursing, you really have no idea. Looking at it now, it looks as if he’s not in the right position at all. Also, he’s not covered up. There’s no way you can cover up anything other than a newborn; they don’t stand for it.
Wanna know how? At least 99 times out of 100, the “elimination” doesn’t happen without any warning in advance. And when you see those tell-tale signs (the most obvious ones are stopping whatever activity the child was into, squatting with that 1000-meter gaze in their eyes and maybe some slight grunting), you walk over to the child, move him/her quickly to a place more suitable for “elimination” or just slap a diaper up against the child’s butt. Easy peasy. And if you miss out, you just pick up and clean up. Just “like a dog”.
Of course I’ve no cite for this, it’s purely anecdotal, based only on my own experience with three children and observations of my friends’ children in similar situations.
We keep our boobies and our toddlers covered up here in the US because nobody wants mosquito bites (or DEET) on their boobies or toddler butts.
Perhaps you live in a less-buggy part of the US, tho.
Anyway, it was a joke.
How many posters here have pointed out that both your premises are false, that women do breastfeed in public and kids do run around naked sometimes?
And how many have pointed out that reluctance to have one’s kids running around starkers is for fear of being seen as trashy, not for sexual reasons?
But you’ve got your one post confirming your hypothesis, I guess.
For pooping, sure. But for urinating, my own observation indicates that it comes suddenly and the kid is just as surprised as anyone else when it happens.
Nursing in public is common. I was doing it 10+ years ago and it was common then.
Toddlers are happily naked at home and in the backyard, but when playing in public, it’s widely seen as appropriate to be clothed. I’d agree with Manda JO that any sexualization of it came later than the actual custom, which was originally a class thing.
It’s not (fully) accepted in Scandinavia, either. For instance, I’m sure there are no nude men jogging in public. Are there any nude people at work in office buildings? When you go to an ordinary restaurant, do nude people wait on you? In Scandinavia: how much non-sexual nudity can someone really get away with in a public setting without social or legal sanction?
Well then. On this matter, the only ultimate difference between Scandinavia and the U.S. is where the line is drawn. The reasons behind the location of the lines are mere details. Neither area is “better” or “more enlightened” than the other.
The posts that, rather that agree with you that childhood nakedness is sexualized in the United States, state that it is a class marker, with childhood nakedness associated with the rural poor (as is also apparently the case in Taiwan) and/or the generally lazy and unkempt.
I’m sure it doesn’t make sense to you, the idea that only poor, low-class people let their kids run naked, but culture rarely does make sense to outsiders.
Good point with being clothed - I grew up working class with parents who had been raised on farms, and thinking about it, my parents were pretty diligent about making sure we wore full clothes, wore shoes, etc. if we were anywhere other than around the house. And if people were coming over to visit, even as kids we had to put shoes on.
Sure, and it was on those details I was looking for some opinions. Thank y’all for your opinions. And I have now made the observation that some of the opinions which have been put forward by other posters seem to agree with my (initially unannounced) opinion. However, other opinions disagree, and ignorance has been fought
(1) Is “childish” really the right word for being hypersensitive to nudity?
(2) We actually tut-tut more over a naked child than earlier generations did. Perhaps this is because we’re more sensitive to pedophilia (arguably to the point of paranoia?). Images of naked or seminaked children that, in a “more innocent age” would have been regarded as cute and innocent (like the famous Coppertone ad, or like Victorian images of naked children such as the 1890s ad for Ayer’s Cathartic Pills (which an article at Cracked.com brought to my attention)) would nowadays be taboo, or at least get a :dubious:.
We are far more open about sex and sexuality than earlier generations were, but I haven’t seen us becoming any more open toward nudity in nonsexual contexts. Many of us live our lives hardly ever getting an opportunity to see a member of the opposite sex naked except for those we’re intimate with.