I feel like that was partly directed at me, and my neighbors across the street. I do not hate them, I only hate the noise they make. How do I know they don’t speak English? Because one day I came home to find a chicken bopping around my back yard, and I had to go over there and ask them if it was theirs. And I had to ask them in Spanish, because when I said, “Is that your chicken?” all I got was a head tilt and a “Como?” I am by no means fluent, but I can make myself understood. Spanish is a beautiful language and I am lucky to have the opportunity to learn it from native speakers at my work, about half of whom are from either Mexico, Guatemala, Puerto Rico or Columbia.
You’ve been complaining about hordes of rampaging children in your neighborhood for quite some time now. According to you, several years ago they kicked holes in your neighbour’s garage doors using soccer balls, were breaking cars, damaged your truck, were destroying planters all over the neighborhood, and so on. This doesn’t sound like a very good neighborhood to me.
Actually, that was damaged the garage door (it was dented) and the only planters I know of are mine and the next door neighbors. I don’t remember anything about the truck or any cars. Much of that has slowed down since the guy next door went over this blood in his eyes when he saw his garage door. I still lose plants to balls and tromping feet, but apparently the new planters are strong and heavy enough that they are not easily broken.
The thing is, parents allowing their kids to run amok without supervision is so common that I doubt that there is any place “safe” from such things. As I said, it wasn’t until fairly recently that we started having these issues, and it is mostly the one family across the street, with a little bit from the family on one side of us tho their kids are now old enough to not be an issue, and the grandkids are too young to start being an issue.
Really, we can’t get away from irresponsible parents no matter where we live.
If so, that makes even less sense!
Yeah, you’re right. He mentioned Mexico though, so I was trying to find some context for it to be like, related to the rest of the thread somehow. Oh, well.
I’m with RickJay on this one. Nothing about this neighborhood sounds that great to me. It may have been a good place to live, but doesn’t sound like it now.
Here in Texas HOAs are everywhere and are the devil’s work; however, my HOA is pretty chill and has rules about parking, etc. There are noise rules,and certainly no-one breaks them here.
Maybe the OP should start a neighborhood association… Not sure how one does that.
You can certainly create a neighborhood association now, but it would have to be a completely voluntary thing. You cannot create rules AFTER people have bought and legally require them to comply.
Which begs the question, if such issues are so important to you, why wouldn’t you choose to live in a community with a HOA? Such things are exceedingly rare where I live, but are very, very common in America. One assumes, for this very reason.
Kind of like moving into an apartment tower with no elevator and then complaining about the stairs.
Bad example, being that you’re from Ontario. For us, only poor people live in “apartment towers”; we call them ghettos. When I first starting living in Ontario, I was severely berated the first time that I asked if the apartment towers were some type of government subsidized, low-rent, poor people housing. It hadn’t crossed my mind then that some people actually chose to live in those kinds of conditions.
You specifically said that a neighbour’s garage door had soccer balls kicked right though it. That takes a lot of shots.
Really?
[QUOTE=curlcoat]
Apparently, the guy next door is worse than I am, since he got an actual hole in his garage door from the soccer balls, and the guy across the street and one down must win the D. N. prize since they broke a window in his truck with a baseball.
[/QUOTE]
(emphasis mine)
[QUOTE=curlcoat]
If I had kept them, I could send you the reciepts to replace the planters in the front yard that the neighborhood children destroyed. Or I could send you a picture of the damage in the shell on our truck, courtesy of the kids climbing in the tree in our yard, bending a branch so it scratched hell out of the truck.
[/QUOTE]
That sounds like a pretty wild neighborhood. Are you sure it’s a good one? I’ve lived in a lot of neighborhoods and never seen such rampant destruction. If this kind of stuff happened around here with the sort of regularity you’ve described, the cops would be on it like white on rice.
HOAs, around here, are notorious for having extremely petty rules about things like what color you can paint your house, while they ignore the larger quality of life issues. When my husband and I went house shopping, the first item on our list was “No HOA”.
The statement wasn’t “is it a great place to live”, it was “this is one of the better neighborhoods in my city”. Here in the land of McMansions and wall to wall people, I imagine there are a few neighborhoods where children are not allowed to run amok, but we probably couldn’t afford them and I’m sure they would have even more rules about pets than our city does. I know of one place in a nearby city, maybe the whole city? can’t remember - anyway, it is illegal to smoke in your garage if the door is open. Stupid stuff like that.
We have a voluntary one that maintains the walls/planting at the entrances and I think does some work at the city owned park. They also negotiated with the company that built a bunch of condos nearby to get us new double paned windows and sound walls. But they don’t do any day-to-day stuff - I’m not sure any HOA does that do they?
Hmmm, maybe he did - I know ours was only dented, maybe I have forgotten that his was damaged more. Would make sense since he doesn’t have any vehicles parked in his driveway during the day, where we generally have one, so the kids would have more access to his garage. And he was really pissed…
Oh, yeah! I remember the truck window now! That was before the family across the street had any children old enough to do that kind of thing, so I guess I wasn’t making the connection.
As I said above, as things are in S Cal, yes it’s a good neighborhood. Also, these are things that have happened over the time that I’ve lived here, which is coming up on 20 years. These things don’t happen daily or even monthly for the most part - my point bringing those things up is not anything to do with frequency, it’s the reaction of most of the people that “kids will be kids” and we should just accept that they are going to break things that don’t belong to them or their families and just roll with it. Or they are going to scream like they are being flayed alive and we should just ignore it.
Most if not all of the Canadian kids I’ve known have been at least fairly well mannered - maybe you all just don’t have the speshul snowflake problem up there? 
Oh, we’ve got it, too, unfortunately.
I did notice when we visited a zoo in Chicago that the kids were behaving a whole level of worse than what we were used to from Canadian kids (we visit our local zoo regularly). That is of course a tiny little data point, but it might be indicative of some societal differences.
My experience is the “kids will be kids” variety of parent is in the minority, even if on occasion we all let our kids run a little wilder than other times (sometimes for good reason- my kids got to run around playing flashlight tag on 4th of July, sometimes by accident). There have been times I didn’t get outside right away to tell my kids to stop screaming etc, most parents recognize the importance of teaching our children to be nice, considerate people. The point is, (aside from neighbors one sees all the time and knows their parenting style), you can catch any kid acting badly and catch any parent in a moment of inattention. Kids are kids and parents are human and most are doing their best to raise good kids.
I lived in So Cal with my two kids, in a pretty nice neighborhood, and I can tell you horror stories of the intolerant families with no kids- like the neighbor who called DCF on every family with kids over a course of year. It was a systematic abuse of the system to target families whose kids made too much noise, in her estimation, or she simply didn’t like. She drummed up reasons to call. I had a 3 year old with a severe ear infection wake up screaming at 4 in the morning. A month later we got a visit from DCF because she accused my husband of hurting him in the swimming pool (no such thing happened). Another neighbor’s son went through a rough patch and cried at nap time, pretty loudly, next a visit to them after he fell and scraped knees etc. But I know most childless people aren’t vindictive, entitled witches. Lousy people suck, childless or with children.
I really sympathize with the OP. I used to live in an apartment complex in a residential area. There was this one house, I believe on the corner, that would have a bunch of kids do the exact same thing.
what struck me was that it wasn’t just yelling or laughing, it was this blood-curling screaming, this shrill shrieking that was so different from anything I’d heard before. I was not the sound of kids simply playing but rather making noise for the sake of it. And it would go on for hours and also into the night.
I have no idea what they were “playing” with because there was enough vegetation that hindered my view of the backyard but it was amazingly annoying. They weren’t even 100 yards away from me.
curlcat, the place next to the polite, waving and smiling at CNL teenagers is for sale. I think you would be a great neighbor. We don’t have screaming kids here, just some shouts and laughter.
I’m not a fan of kids at the best of times and when they start screaming its like fingernails on a chalkboard. Today, I went out to breakfast with some friends and the server tried to sit us next to a table with a howling kid and a caregiver who didn’t seem to notice.
We just stood there for a minute, then one of my friends (who spoils his grandkids something terrible) spoke up and asked the server for the no screaming kid section.
If she hadn’t moved us to the other side of the room, we would have left and gone somewhere else.
The server did move us, but never said a thing to the caregiver. I don’t get it, one woman with a screaming kid was making the place so unattractive that 5 people were willing to ride away. I’m willing to bet that the people who were next to them won’t go back. Why would any diner be willing to risk losing regular patrons just to keep one inattentive caregiver happy?
Fun coincidence time! I was out doing yard work today from about one o’clock until about four thirty. The entire session was punctuated by three kids across the street (in the other direction from the Mexicans) screaming fucking bloody murder every five or six minutes. One of the bigger kids had a stick, I think he was pretending it was a lightsaber, and he was chasing the other two with it and they were screeching like he was really beating them to death. I did almost call the cops because once or twice it sounded to me like he’d really whacked one of them, but then they’d reappear and seem to be perfectly fine. And nobody said a goddamn word to them. I thought about it, but I would have been fighting a losing battle.
I’m always amazed at the servers/hostesses who try to seat us right next to the family with screaming kids when there are plenty of other seats available. What makes them think that two middle-aged adults with no kids have any interest in being near screeching children? Either we don’t have kids, or we made efforts to leave ours at home. (Yeah, I know, they’re probably seating only for server convenience - tough. If you want repeat customers, you have to take more than that into consideration.)
I up and move to another table when screamers are seated adjacent to me. Some folks are not too annoyed at the sound of noisy children. Unfortunately, I am very much annoyed by noisy children, so I keep clear of them whenver possible.
Maybe. OTOH, children running in a store with no adult nearby that appears to be associated with them, a child screaming while a parent is standing right there & not saying anything, kids hanging off of store displays with the parent again standing right there & not saying anything - none of these look like a moment of inattention or a parent doing their best to raise good kids.
I have no idea whether or not these sorts of parents are in the minority, but they do seem to be becoming more common.
What is DCF? Was there more than one person calling authorities about child noise?
Heh, it seems to be a cliche - retire in S Cal, move to Arizona. We still have another six years to go before Mr Coat retires, and I’m not sure we want to move away from the temperate weather we have here.
I’ve had to do that many times - I think servers just assume that a middle aged woman must adore kids at all times, no matter what they are doing. I’ve actually walked into some restaurants then turned and walked out due to getting hit with unreasonable noise right off, or having to dodge running kids.
In my experience, many of these inattentive folks are hyper-sensitive to any perceived criticism of their (lack of) parenting style. A couple of times a server has been leading me towards a noisy/flailing table and when I’ve put on the brakes and indicated I’m not going to sit in that area, the woman with the kids has had quite a bit to say about it, loudly, once with cussing. If this happens often enough, servers would be skittish about trying to do anything about problem children.
This. I’m guessing that they are trying to seat SOMEONE or a group of someones next to the screamers, rather than tell the parent screamers to shut the kids up or get out. The servers or hosts are going to keep trying to seat people next to the screamers until they find one person or a group who doesn’t say “Nope, not gonna sit next to the screamers.”
Back when restaurants around here allowed smoking in some sections, it was the same thing. I’d ask for a non-smoking table, and the server would try to put me right next to the smoking section. I’d object, and get seated where I was less likely to encounter smoke. And the next person who asked for a non-smoking table would be led to that same table.