If I have pictures of my toddler naked (in a non-sexual way, obviously), is that considered child pornography?

Don’t email them or post them on the web ever.

Unfortunately, this can be considered questionable. Because you are her parent and, as awful as this sounds, because you are a woman people will probably not look into it. If you get these pictures developed at a photo center, a clerk may send these pictures off to the police or to the FBI for them to get checked to see if they qualify as child pornography. This actually happened to a professor of mine. She lost some pictures of her kids in the bath and a few weeks later, she got them back in a different batch of photos with big red check marks on the back of the photos signifying that they are okay.

It is a sad thing when innocent pictures of our children (and I have a few too) become questionable in terms of child pornography. Nonetheless, @KatawaGrey and @JLeslie are right, even taking pictures of a little one playing in the surf with no nappy on is viewed by some as suspect.

I don’t see a problem with the photos, just a problem with them being available to the general public.

I’m the bohemian type, I think there is nothing cuter than a naked baby toddling around.
I took many naked baby, toddler, preschool pics of my daughter when she was little.
She was always running around bare bottomed as a young child. I have tons of pics of naked river baby and naked swimming pool baby and naked bathtime baby.

So sad that our world has to think like a pedophile. :-(

Pictures can be interpreted any way, depending on the mind set of the viewer. Do not share them online.

sounds fine to me. I would avoid putting them on the web but definitely check out the artist Sally Mann

Unfortunately in our modern world, “your intent” doesn’t always matter.

To give an example, there was a story several years ago about a new mother who was nursing her infant. She noticed that she had a physiological reaction to his suckling of her breast: it was actually arousing to her. She asked her pediatrician if that was a normal thing for her to feel. (She wasn’t trying to feel that way or forcing the child to suckle to produce the feeling. But she had the feeling and that led to a question that many people would consider normal enough. Certainly normal enough, judging by a lot of the questions that we see here from day to day.)

Because physicians are required nowadays to report any potential child sexual abuse to authorities, the doctor had to report this perfectly innocent question from a patient to law enforcement. Child Protective Services got involved. Because the thing involved so many authorities by this time, it got top-heavy with “oversight” and “officialdom” ... and the woman actually lost custody of her infant for a number of months until she finally sued to regain custody (with oversight from CPS, naturally).

@WasCy

That is ludicrous! What a world, what a world!
Breast feeding stimulates hormone activity, uterus contraction, there is NOTHING obscene or abnormal in these physiological responses of the body. What utter nonsense, bullshit, to be more exact! Grrr!

I don’t see how it could. I’m sure most parents have at least some photos like this. Though as the others said, it might not be such a good idea to spread them around, considering how paranoid some people are when it comes to such things (the phrase I often use “pedophile hysteria” comes into play here). Some people just don’t understand the concept of “context”.

That photo of a three-year-old me naked wearing my dad’s shoes…so scandalous… ;)

Hahah.. My baby brother refused to stay dressed until he was about 9, so it was naked pictures or no pictures at all.

There are loads of pictures of me naked as a toddler. In the bath, running round the garden on a sunny day, things like that. They are all innocent pictures and it’s sad that nowadays, parents can get into trouble for such pictures.

We had a fellow jelly ask a question about why her son’s picture was taken off of photobucket. Here is the question.

The picture is of her son helping stir something in a mixing bowl while he was topless. Terrible, right? ugh

You are best to print the pictures yourself like we used to in the good ol days.

@jonsblond Wow. A little boy without a shirt on is offensive?

I have posted pictures of my girl topless on facebook without even thinking about it, because she doesn’t even have breasts yet. When I look at her, I don’t see a woman, I see a baby. So, with that mindset, the photos we took at the hospital during and immediately after her birth are all considered offensive. Wow.

You’re too innocent, @stemnyjones. It’s not that photos of small children are in any way “offensive” to people like you, me and other people with good will and good intent towards all children.

The problem is that such photos are attractive to the wrong kinds of adults, for the wrong reasons. No one wants you to expose your child to the attention of such people.

No, trust me @WasCy, I know that there are pervs out there. I guess what I meant to say is that it’s sad that you have to be careful about things like that.

I can understand why we need to be careful about uploading naked photos of your kids/toddlers however innocent to the internet but it’s becoming crazy that parents are now fearing that their own pictures could be construed as pornographic. About a year ago this very subject came up in conversation and my Mum said that she sometimes worries about the photo she has of me as a 2 year old in her photo album taken in the mid 1970’s….It is a naked frontal photo of me crying and underneath my parents have written, ‘Streaker…‘No, I won’t put my nappy on!’ It’s a really cute photo and just because it shows my penis, it is in no way salacious or pornographic.

The world has gone crazy with this over zealousness about C.P. and some common sense and rationality needs to be taken here. If I eventually find a girlfriend to bring back to my parents’ then I hope that my Mum brings out that photo to embarrass me in the tradition that many mothers do.

David

I agree with you, @david_band. It worries me sometimes because I know I may have trouble printing out photos of her in the bath or running around the house naked, but with the luck that I have with computers breaking and losing things, I’m afraid that something will happen to them and I will lose them forever. I know that it’s a silly worry in one way, but I don’t need the extra bill of paying for one of those back up websites that could possibly end up crashing anyway, and the second I copy them to a CD or flash drive I know I will lose it.

I can see how people who work at photo developing centers would start to just not print all of them – the same way that someone who works at an animal shelter and sees animals euthanized every day eventually has no pity for the people turning in their pets, no matter how disastrous the circumstances are. After you see bad so many times, you start to lose good faith in the human race. I worked at Walmart developing photos for about a year, and just in that short time I saw a lot of weird things, not just related to kids but all kinds of stuff. My manager would usually approve photos of young kids in the bath or whatever as long as it didn’t seem like pornography, but I did once get a few photos of this nude little girl, probably 6 years old, who had been body painted on every part of her body – and I mean every part. To the point that it was a bit disturbing. I could see, while I still see my daughter as a baby and she has no signs of breasts whatsoever, body painting her on her torso or whatever, but this girl had no underwear on and it was disturbing to think of her parents (or whoever it was) painting designs on her private areas.

And I was only there for 1 year to see that, in addition to many other disturbing photos, like a set of an elderly man who was being abused by the retirement home he was living in, so I can imagine what those people see if they work there for 20 years..

These days you can print photos off on your own printer @stemnyjones. I would do that and make sure you save your photos on discs or on a flash drive or something. Just in case. I have plenty of photos of my children naked, covered in ice cream, playing in the pool etc. etc. and like David there are a few embarrassing nudie photos of me aged under five out there. Keep them, love them but don’t share them with the world.