We have, living three doors down from us, the “screamer”. She screams constantly, a high pitched, ear piercing scream.
I am going to talk to her parents to see if they can do something. It’s an unreasonable expectation that someone should have to listen to that on what otherwise would be, a nice quiet saturday afternoon.
Yep. David Brin in Earth had a character muse on this exact fact. I can’t find the exact quote but it boiled down to how human infants must be, to predators, the most annoying and noxious living things around.
Something akin to: “Hey, Lion! Here I am! Small, tasty and defenseless! I’m making noise! I don’t hide in the long grass or have disguises or keep quiet! I don’t have to because you don’t dare.”
There is something in that. Humans have always been social creatures, and where there are young children there are usually human adults withinin call - predators soon learn to avoid people, or they become ex-predators.
In a way it is like those other animals that positively advertise their presence with bright colours - don’t eat that bright red frog, you will regret it! Don’t eat that loud, defenseless toddler - you will regret it! The one is poisionous and the other has hordes of very nasty adults on call.
I have read that little girls screaming are not actually that loud - that we hear best on the “human emergency band”, so sounds that occur in that range sound very loud to us. That’s why ambulance sirens are in that same pitch range - so you can hear them from a long way away and pay attention to them.
HongKongFooey is on to something here… you need to slip some shock-collars on the little darlings when the parents aren’t looking!
Yeah, Brin followed it up with something like “Human infants are annoying, but to predators human adults are terrifying.”
I guess we just got lucky with our 3 kids, because exactly such an approach worked for us.
Of course, I’m not sure we simply let our kids get “really wound up” such that they lacked the ability to control themselves. I think it is worthwhile to teach your kids at an early age that they ought not let themselves get out of control. Sets a good precedent for later in life IMO. Unless you want to create adults who claim (and believe) that they “just can’t help” their undesireable behavior.
As far as the neighbor kids, no - there is nothing you can do unless you are on EXCEPTIONALLY good terms with them.
We don’t “let them” get out of control.
Makes sense to me.
Plus, half or more of the annoyance factor of children’s shrieking is that an adult can’t help but notice it - even happy shrieking is half-pushing that button that says “do something”. A real terror-scream of a child is literally galvanizing, as a parent my body is in motion towards it practically before my brain has a chance to realize what I’m hearing.
It seems to me a good case can be made that, for human children, being loud is a better survival tactic than being unnoticed.
Well, there’s the thing; all kids are different and while consistency in approach always works, it’s always a different approach. For all we know, the OP’s neighbour is in Week 14 of what’s going to be a 52-week job of getting the kid out of this habit. Children do not change overnight. They’re hard work.
Our little one just doesn’t scream very much, so we’ve never had to deal with this. And when she is loud, asking her to be quiet works, and has worked since she was 2. But getting her to eat new foods? Extremely difficult. Is there an easy solution? No, there isn’t, and anyone who jumps in and says “well, I don’t have kids but of course here’s how I’d solve the problem” is speaking from a position of extreme ignorance.
A trebuchet large enouh to sling them into another neighbourhood would handle the problem nicely.
I often thought it would be great if we could surgically implant hearing aids in children so their shrieks are amplified 10 fold. Barring that, shock collars with a common frequency.
I’ve got a flock of children waiting for a bus near my house. I hope none of them are ever attacked because I wouldn’t be able to tell from the current level of screaming.
I’m just curious if any of you screamed like this when you were children. Because I know positively that I didn’t and none of my cousins (who are younger than I am so I would remember) did, and I didn’t know any children who screamed in that way (when nothing was wrong, that is, and very loudly). And now lots of children do. What, I wonder, has changed?
When my daughter was a baby, if she cried, I immediately tended to her. Some people (why yes, they DID all have whiny, fussy children) told me that I should let her cry it out. I never saw the point of this. When my daughter cried, she was hungry or had a full diaper or maybe she was just lonely and wanted her Mama or Daddy. The thing is, she learned that she could cry for a bit, get her needs met, and then everyone was happy. She did cry for lengthy periods of time when she was teething, or had colic, or had an earache. However, I was always there with her, holding her and rocking her and walking with her. The thing is, she had at least one parent who would come and pay attention when she cried, and we always tried to find out why she was crying.
I notice that kids who are whiny and fussy seem to have parents who just ignore them until they’ve whined or cried for a while. I don’t know which comes first, but it does seem to go hand-in-hand.
I remember that my parents would not tolerate screaming from my younger sister, who was the only one of us three who was inclined to that sort of thing.
Well, sure sounds like you aren’t being very effective in preventing it! :rolleyes:
A-Men.
We are fortunate that our little one is obedient, and responds well to light discipline - when he gets too excited and starts to make inappropriate noise, we tell him to be quiet and give him a warning and if he persists he gets a time-out - and that seems to work. Only one have we had to actually remove him from a family party when he would not calm down … but I’m not under the illusion that we can take credit for this or that this approach would work for everyone: kids can be amazingly stubborn and strong-willed, and every kid is different.
Our kid’s major “thing” is that he doesn’t want to go to bed, ever - the more tired he is, the more he wants to stay up, and he’s capable of inventing an amazing variety of excuses for not going to sleep - he’s thirsty, he’s hungry, he has to go to the bathroom, there are monsters under the bed … the thing is you can’t, short of cloroform, force a kid to sleep, so it can be a bit of a battle. We try to establish an iron-clad routine - bath, brush teeth, read three stories, bed. This seems to work in part but not always …
::sigh::
I have three kids who scream as if they’re caught in machinery every 2 minutes or so, despite 10,786 exhortations not to scream, inside or outside, 11,452 demands to leave each other alone (origin of the majority of screaming incidents), 9,394 timeouts, 7,827 removals of priveliges and 22,397 parental brain implosions at the utter futility of attempting to keep the little [del]shits[/del] darlings at least tolerably quiet. We’ve mashed every button on their consoles to no effect. 
Neither of my kids were noisy for no reason. We were a quiet family—no tv on during meals, no tv as background noise. We lived out in the country and my kids spotted squirrels and rabbits and birds and learned that a lot of noise made these go away. My sister’s kids, on the other hand, would let out blood-curdling screams of happiness, for no reason anyone could understand.
I would guess nothing except you. You’re older now and notice the noise. I’m the oldest of 4 (I’m 32 now). 2 of the younger ones were shriekers, two of us usually were not. You’d hear the same general level of hubbub from a playground 20 years ago, 40 years ago - probably any time that such things existed - that you hear now. Some kids yelp when excited and some don’t.
And for the record, no one I know who was a shrieker as a kid now has any problem with uncontrollable outbursts.
No, really and truly you did not hear the same level of noise 40 years ago. Really.