Yeah, the shrieking thing is trainable. I was at the Ren Fair a few years back watching Dr. Dumpe, fire-eater. Some pre-teen girls screamed the first two times he swallowed fire. The good doctor stopped after the second time, told them it was hard on his ears and to please stop. They did.
But, it will (as noted by a previous poster), take you strolling over to your neighbors to make the request. Be clear that you understand some noise, yelling, laughter is understandable - but not screaming. And request that they put a stop to it all at some reasonable hour.
It might actually work better to do it mid-week, when there is no castle currently in play. Mention that everyone was having a good time, but the screaming was a little out of hand, and could they please put a time-limit on the fun, as you need your sleep. This is where, if you are known to your neighbors (not necessarily a friend, but on speaking terms), you can make reasonable requests without looking like a jerk.
Then, if that doesn’t work (especially the late night stuff), call the cops - that is what they are there for.
Most considerate parents do try to teach their kids not to scream when outside. The usual spiel goes something like “You can’t scream because then I’ll think you’re hurt. You can scream if bones are broken, but that’s all. It will scare me and it will scare the neighbors.”
So you could always try to do a version of that with the neighbors. “It’s great that the kids are having fun and getting exercise, but every time they scream I think someone is hurt. Could you please ask them not to scream?”
You love and adore the sounds of children at play, music to your ears.
Alas, the neighbourhood is like any neighbourhood, someone just got their colicky baby to sleep, someone is home sick, someone is working shift work etc. It’s summer, peoples windows are open, I’m sure you understand.
It’s beginning to grate, on some in the neighbourhood, and in the name of keeping the peace you’ve come by to offer a suggestion.
Should absolutely nothing else change, it would greatly ease tensions if, from time to time, the voice of an adult was heard, reminding the children, while it’s okay to have fun and laugh, there’s no need for shrieking. ‘We do have neighbours and they don’t hear to listen to this racket, please keep it down.’
Everyone makes noises that their neighbours must tolerate, of course. Tolerance, for this level of noise, would rise substantially if people felt the ‘at the scene’ adults were speaking up, from time to time, in defense of a little less noise.
It’s just a suggestion, of one simple thing, that could well ease tensions. Please just consider it.
I don’t know about the legalities, but that would annoy the shit out of me, and I’m a parent of three children. My kids are not permitted to shriek like that when playing outside. I don’t care if this makes me a bitch or a bad mother who doesn’t enjoy the sounds of children playing or what. If the shrieking starts, they come inside instantly. I will not tolerate it.
If that crap is going on until midnight, there has got to be a noise ordinance or something they’re violating. I’d look into it. Renting a bounce house for the kids is one thing. Letting them play in it while shrieking until midnight is just being a bad neighbor.
My suggestion is that you look into your local laws regarding nuisance and quiet enjoyment. It doesn’t matter what time of day it is, and it doesn’t matter if it is precious snowflake children making the nuisance; you have a right to quiet enjoyment of your house and yard.
Here’s the only problem with that - you go over and talk to them and they tell you off.
Now you may not want to go to the police because they will know it was you and it can start a crazy neighbourhood war. I know it sounds ridiculous and paranoid, but it happened on my old street. People can be nuts.
You might try talking to them and asking them to keep the shrieking down, and they might be, oh, yeah, sorry. That will last about half an hour, IMO, and they will rev it up again, forgetting the earnest conversation they just had with you. That’s the way it goes, in one ear, out the other. I would check about loud noise after a certain hour, though, no one should have to listen to obnoxious noise when most people are relaxing or getting ready to go to sleep.
I second this suggestion. Most (all?) municipalities have laws about the hours you can disturb people. My own county has the “9-to-9” laws–You have to be quiet before 9 a.m. and after 9 p.m. (10 p.m. on weekends). After 9:30 (10:30) the cops do go around and tell people to STFU.
Beyond the quiet times at night, you have a right to quiet enjoyment at all times - constant shrieking that interferes with neighbours isn’t illegal just late at night - it’s probably illegal in the middle of the afternoon, too. We tend to tolerate noise from neighbours more in the day than at night, but it’s still not cool.
This. They live 100 feet from you. I just don’t understand people who don’t know their neighbors Most of these problems can be resolved easily with a conversation.
You’d think, but sometimes when you have ask neighbours to show basic consideration and common sense, they react with contempt or anger instead of contrition. That’s why people would rather call the police than knock on a door.
Shortly after I bought my house I discovered that my neighbour’s children liked to play tag and have screaming contests in my backyard. The kids told me point blank that they’d always played in my yard and wouldn’t stop. I put a lock on the gate and they merely climbed the fence. When I asked their parents to intervene they were all “Kids’ll be kids shrug”.
I had to repeatedly shoo them off my front porch and out of my yard for months until they found other ways to amuse themselves and, more than ten years later, the family still despises me.
In the complex where I live, we’ve had both screaming and non-screaming kids. The non-screamer lived here from birth to age 4–never heard a peep out of him the entire time. The screamer (around 3 years old, moved in six months ago) can be heard every single day. He can’t make it from the carport to the front door without crying or screaming about something. He got banned from the pool area because he couldn’t spend 10 minutes there without raising a major fuss about something. Very, very annoying.
How do you enforce that right? Police wont bother for middle-of-the-day kids shrieks.
The thing with noisy neighbours is that you never really know if you’re the assholish neighbour that calls the cops for every sound he might hear (but makes no effort at being noiseless himself) or if your neighbours are really behaving like assholes.
Also, the problem is that when you have constant or abnormal noise you kind of expect the “offender” to correct his behaviour by himself. But then we live in a world where there are always some people standing on the left of an escalator and not moving. So, your neighbours could be like that, clueless.
And if you wait till they correct themselves, the only result will be you confronting them after your piss-O-meter has exploded.
That said, it is not a good idea to look for a legal hammer to crush noisy neighbours with. Check the local sound limitations, in sound range and hours. And then, check with your neighbours, politely. You get more of people out of goodwill than out of coercion.
I had shriekers and screamers in the three swimming pools directly behind me at the beginning of summer. Between them and the non-stop lawnmowers going on both sides, I couldn’t sit out on the deck in the evening without something in my ears. That’s the price you pay, I guess. They went in at dark, at least.
If the retired guy down the block is complaining about every damned noise he ever hears that may explain why the police have stopped responding to his complaints. It’s not that they aren’t enforcing noise bylaws; it’s that they’re sick of responding to his cries of wolf.
Continuous loud noise isn’t acceptable no matter the source. Kids make noise and I’m fine with that, but if the screaming is actually non stop for hours on end - I don’t know how that is physically possible, but whatever - the parents should stop them.
I love kids, but hate when they scream. It brings my heart into my throat because I think something is wrong. My mother taught us growing up to never scream because it was a]obnoxious and b]indicated distress. Apparently people don’t train their kids in this manner (anymore - or maybe they never did). I hear kids screaming all the time, drives me nuts.
Obviously, these neighbors consider the piercing screams of their children musical and delightful. Or else they lock the kids in the bouncer and put in their earplugs, I don’t know. Either way I can’t imagine a way to say ‘your children are annoying me while they play for hours each day’ that will result in them putting a stop to the screaming.
Do you really want an honest answer for that? Hopefully, I can keep this out of the Pit level language. Because American society is too child centric. Forget about Christianity, too many people worship at the altar of the brat. The kids are spoiled,and the people raising kids get away with horrible rudeness that would ordinarily leave someone socially shunned or possibly fined and arrested.
I’m with some of the other parents here. I don’t care if you like kids or not; I can’t imagine anyone being okay with that level of noise for that duration.
I have kids, and I’d never let them be outside shrieking for hours (or minutes, for that matter). But when my daughter goes to the second-house-over neighbors’ to play, there are 4 or 5 kids in the back (including my dearest) screaming their everloving heads off. They are playing Hunger Games, and it involves much drama and bellowing and deathly wailing and screams for help. It’s horrendous. I end up doing yard work in my back yard sometimes just so I can yell at them (across the next-door neighbors’ yard) to tone it down, because the parents won’t do it.
If it was a birthday party or something that I knew was going to be noisy, I’d talk to my neighbors first and let them know that I’d try to keep it under control, apologize in advace for the expected noise level, and assure them it was a one-time deal. But every weekend? No way.
FWIW, I don’t let my dogs bark either. And knowing that, when clever/evil Sally decides to come in, she stands and barks at the clouds, then looks at the door to see if I’m opening it yet.