<p>No one would suggest that anyone “go to town on the family room sofa while the rest of the family watches TV”.</p>
<p>But why, exactly, other than tradition, should they “await footsteps from above at any point”? Why do we act, and they act, like they are doing something wrong, and we are trying to stop them? When they aren’t really doing something wrong, and in many cases we’re not actually trying to stop them?</p>
<p>I’m not proposing a hippie agenda here, and I understand boundaries. I just think this is a massively weird and hypocritical aspect of the lives of many families, including mine, that gets taken for granted rather than thought about. </p>
<p>In my case, I DID have to walk to school in the snow for years, and either direction involved a long hill up (and an equally long one down). It didn’t actually build character, and as an adult I didn’t expend any effort to make my kids walk to school in the snow rather than take the bus. Not to mention that where my kids lived had a lot less snow than where I grew up. It would be dumb to argue that my kids missed something important developmentally by not walking more in the snow. Why do we act as though it’s developmentally necessary for them to fear detection while doing sex play?</p>