Chapter 7: Developing a Naked in School Program

July

For Arie’s and Jordan’s second birthday in July, Kimberly and Daan arranged to go to Holland, where Daan’s parents lived, to celebrate the occasion, and Kimberly’s parents, as well as the Cummings, all came there too. By this point, Jordan had mostly stopped asking about her parents, but she did insist on taking her “journaling dolls” with her. She told Kimberly that she was talking to her mommy and daddy when she talked to the dolls, which she did faithfully every night. The visit was too late for the annual tulip festival, but the families did visit Nelis’ Dutch Village and the Windmill Island Gardens just before the attraction’s “Peak Bloom Week” of their perennial flowers.

After the summer of the children’s second birthdays, life finally returned to a routine in the Janssen household. By the time of the kids’ third birthdays, Kimberly was a board-certified psychiatrist and was working at both the BMC and the Boston Children’s Hospital as an attending physician and had started a small private practice. She also had several research projects underway and was collaborating with Dr Eleanor Garner at the Horning Institute. Kimberly was becoming known as an expert in altered states of consciousness caused by psychosis and by severe psychological or emotional shock. The kinds of psychotic events that she was researching included paranoia, hallucinations, delusions, depersonalization, and derealization.

Her doctoral dissertation research had been done on severe psychological shock, also called acute stress disorder (ASD); this is the mind’s reaction to events which are terrifying or traumatic. Such events can result in a person experiencing dissociative symptoms, like depersonalization, derealization, and dissociative amnesia. Or instead, the events can result in the person developing PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, or even both can occur. Her work in the area now led most mental health providers to view dissociation as a protective coping mechanism of the brain rather than a pathological response like psychosis.

Through the current year, Daan continued with his teaching at the charter high school, but he had begun to step back from full-time teaching. He still coached swimming and taught the Health and Psychology class. But he had also begun to practice privately and had contracted with the school district to serve as the district’s psychologist and continued his contract with the county as a clinical social worker. This gave him access to many of the troubled kids in the wider community and he was learning a tremendous amount about how their exposure to nudity, both in public and in the schools, and in general, how the teens’ exposure to practical sexual education, were affecting vulnerable teens and even pre-teens. He continued to do observational studies; these studies followed the behavior of the subjects but made no attempt to manipulate the conditions causing the behavior being observed. Also, the researcher does not interfere or intervene in the subjects’ actions or become involved with the issues which the subjects encounter. Daan wrote a number of journal articles about the studies he conducted.

One year later

When the children began pre-school, Arie’s and Jordan’s personalities had developed to where their parents could see what they’d likely be as teenagers and even adults. Jordan was an extremely vocal, opinionated, lovingly stubborn, and take-charge kid and tended to dominate her play with Arie. But Arie was no pushover, he gave back what he got when it mattered, nor was he passive. He was extremely tolerant of Jordan’s bossiness, and the parents sometimes noticed him smiling faintly as he calmly talked Jordan down from one of her stubborn episodes.

But when Jordan was unhappy, it was Arie that she sought out for comfort and reassurance rather than a parent.

Later, in grade school, the two kids were always in the same class and they tended to compete with each other to see who could do better, and by pushing each other this way, they made rapid progress. Both Kimberly and Daan were opposed to jumping them in grades, though. They believed that the children needed socialization with children their own age. So Arie and Jordan were given special projects to do and many times, the assigned projects required them to work together

Three years later

The Janssen children were nine years old now. Both parents’ careers were firmly established and Daan began to be frequently asked to consult with staff members and psychologists at the federal Education Department, the DofE. This is when he learned that, about ten years earlier, the DofE had begun to consider a high-school nudity program very similar to the one which was discussed on that news documentary program Daan and Kimberly had watched so long ago now. Over the years, psychologists at the DofE had been working with a varying number of consultants to explore this idea. Daan also found out that data from his past and current research work had been incorporated into those consultants’ work, but because of his views about the psychological damage which could result to children who were forced to participate in a school nudity program, during the period that the project was being considered, the DofE project consultants were reluctant to ask him to participate in their long-term project design.

Daan and Kimberly learned something else while the kids were growing up: the prediction of Brian Cummings about the public’s acceptance of social nudity was actually coming to pass. It was gradual, but the instances of the appearances of random public nudity were very much on the decline, and only a few occupational instances still existed, almost all of these being in a customer-service context. No longer were naked adults seen on the streets and in workplaces, and no naked kids were seen visiting shopping malls. What was happening wasn’t exactly the return of the former prudery which had afflicted the society, but the pendulum was swinging back toward a more collective social modesty. It was in this context, that of the changing of society’s attitude toward public nudity, that the psychologists who were advising the DofE were now strongly advocating for the introduction of a nudity program in the nation’s schools. They believed that by accustoming adolescents to being naked in public, as the teens grew into adulthood, it would restore the more open social attitudes to public nudity.

Daan was finally contacted by the DofE federal task force leader and was asked to attend a project conference-slash-work session. This meeting was to discuss some of the almost fully developed ideas for a mandatory school naked program. The project group planned to present the rationale and justification for their conclusions, and to sketch out the operational details of such a program. According to what the proponents claimed, if the problems of adolescence were dealt with early in the teenaged years, soon after the onset of puberty, then the children would become well adjusted adults.

At the meeting, the head consultant, who was the project’s clinical leader and represented the proponents of the nudity program, took the floor first.

“I’m Scott Reichman and for those who don’t know me, I have a master’s degree in clinical and educational psychology from Freedom University in Santa Monica and I’m a research staff member at American Public Affairs Institute.”

Daan raised his hand. “Excuse me, Mr Reichman, I’m Daan Janssen and everyone here knows me, knows of my background, and has probably read my various journal articles on school nudity. Freedom U’s an on-line university, as I recall. Those remote courses almost never include actual clinical contact with clients, or so I’ve gathered. Did your course work include a guided clinical psychology practicum? For you others here who might not know, that’s a supervised, hands-on training experience which gives practical experience with clients who may need therapy to students in their particular field.”

“That wasn’t part of my psychology program, Mr Janssen,” Reichman responded.

“I see. Then you didn’t have much or any clinical experience with adolescents during your training. No need to answer, sir, you wouldn’t have had any; please go on.”

Reichman glared at Daan for several seconds as Daan looked back at him mildly, and then he continued.

“The newest team members are Janice Tobias and Henry Castonguay; they each have a BS in psych. We’ll begin the session now...”

Daan interrupted again and Reichman reluctantly recognized him again.

“Sorry. Since this is a formal policy decision-making meeting, at the risk of offending people here and appearing to be elitist, I feel compelled to enter into the record that the four other long-term project members all hold psychology master’s degrees—well, so do I, mine is from Harvard University—and their granting institutions are Alabama Memorial U, John Jones U in Tennessee, Skyline U in Los Angeles, and Carter Smith Institute in Indiana. I’m certain that these individuals are fine people, but I’m very concerned about their level of training for a mental health degree whose practice requires not only a strong science background, but also a strong personal intuitive sense developed during clinical practicums, and for their training, mentoring by faculty with good academic reputations. I see from their vitae that many of those necessary qualifications appear to be lacking. There, I’ve said my piece. Sorry if you think I was being offensive.”

“That was unnecessary and uncalled for, Mr Janssen. Sorry, everyone. Let’s continue with the team’s conclusions then,” Reichman went on.

“First, let’s consider the specific adolescent problems which could be addressed by instituting a nudity program in high schools. We know that data exists which shows that mental illness and suicide afflicting teens appears to be increasing at an alarming rate. We believe that this is happening because of numerous common perceived relationship issues between youngsters. Presumably this is happening because they are spending too much time staring at their device screens and not interacting socially; this lack of social contact is impairing the development of important social skills. The result of this, the lack of developing communication skills, is impeding the ability of people of both genders to understand each other. And social communication takes several forms—engaging socially and sexually being the forms important to the adolescent.

“When these skills are poorly developed, the teenager can become socially withdrawn or sexually repressed; we see these issues as major causes of many relationship problems. Eventually these problems will lead to the declining of marriage rates, and we already know that divorce rates are rapidly increasing among young adults; this would continue at ever-increasing rates, as we have projected in our conclusions.