It’s September—the perfect time to go to the beach. Or at least it is if you care about fostering modesty in yourself and your children.
Recently, a mother called in to Mother Miriam Live to ask whether it’s a good idea to take her kids to the beach, given the temptations for her son to “stare at bare legs.” Mother Miriam responded, in part,
I wouldn’t do it. I would never take a child—I wouldn’t take anyone to a beach. I wouldn’t go to the beach myself. I wouldn’t do it. That sort of immodesty—it’s sin. It’s outright sin. And I wouldn’t expose anybody to it, nor would I go myself.
She referred to the “naked girls,” whom the mom’s sons would first have to look at in order to discern whether to look. “You’ve already seen it. It’s too late. And it’s all around you.”
A coworker asked me to write about how my family handles this. The framing of the pitch is important: not whether I, as a father raising six young kids of both sexes, think beaches are a hotbed of immodesty. They absolutely are. Given that . . . just . . . how?
First, we go off-season. Our East Coast destination has delightful weather for most of May and all the way through September. The crowds are much reduced in number and in kind. Retirees and homeschooling families make for far fewer bikinis.
Second, we go off-hours. We avoid the beach at the hottest time of the day. This accords better with our family’s sleep schedule—up at the crack of dawn, desperate for a nap midday, back at ’em late afternoon until dinner and bedtime—and saves us a lot of money and aggravation on sunscreen. Plus even fewer bikinis.
Third, we educate. After all, “fewer bikinis” never means “no bikinis.”
It struck me to hear Mother Miriam’s caller zero in on parents “taking their kids, specifically their sons, to the beach.” But here in the real world, all my sons want to do is build a sand suspension bridge (good luck) and see how deep they can go into the ocean (please don’t).
They don’t notice the “bare legs”—not yet. My daughter does. Even at her very young age, she’s sizing up the girls, noticing how they differ from herself, and asking her parents about them. Right now, she’s the one who most needs our attention, and our protection.
There will be plenty of time, as my sons’ years of innocence are concluding, to educate them about custody of the eyes. For now, we content ourselves to teach all our children (but again, with a focus on our daughters) that it’s ridiculous to show your underwear in public.
Yes, ridiculous. When we read the climax of The Emperor’s New Clothes, the kids are meant to laugh with the crowd. Likewise on the beach. It’s rude to point and laugh, and we teach that. But if strutting in your underwear—and that’s what a bikini is at its most “modest”—doesn’t get you made fun of, it’s only thanks to the decency of the onlookers.
I don’t mean to be flippant about this. Young kids can understand it, without mature concepts infringing on their childhood. We can, later on, juxtapose modern society’s squandering the body’s loveliness with the dignified treatment Catholic morality invites. The memory of ridiculous littoral exhibitionists parading their private parts can be the foundation, without psychosexual baggage forced too young, for deeper lessons about the body’s proper use.
Mother Miriam suggested that her caller “invest in a huge portable pool. . . . That should be the beach recreation for your family.” Sure, that’s one possible solution, though we’ll have to address the mall and the gym and the public square next. I’ve offered my solutions here. My point is not to bicker about the particulars, but simply to insist that the “naked girls” do in fact call for a solution.
I can’t force all the girls not to flaunt their bodies, nor can I force all the boys not to ogle them. But I can seek out seasons and locations that preserve my own girls and boys from a culture of relentless flaunting and ogling. Moreover, I can dress my girls with dignity, and guide my boys’ eyes to innocent things, for the time God has given them to me, until these precious people depart from my arms with the moral grounding to keep it up on their own.
That’s how we go to the beach: for a third of the price, with more than a scrap of sand for ourselves, in September.