Exactly. 
Being a professional nanny for 12 years, and a mom for the last 5, and a teacher off and on for a lot of years in between, I have heard a lot of screeching in my life.
I can tell you it isn’t just girls. Every time I hear a really shrill high pierced screech or scream and look around to find the girl who did it, I am almost always looking at a little boy! Five, six and seven year old boys scream like nobody’s business! They seem to really revel in the fact that they can scream even better than the girls, at that age.
I don’t like it either, and have really tried to keep my son from ever doing it. I don’t mind a little scream here and there, if we are chasing around and being silly, but most of the time they are just doing it to irritate people.
I work somewhere different every day and so am often within hearing distance of Primary schools (5-10yo).
The screeching during breaks is horrendous. I can hear it over my power tools.
I once asked a teacher how do they differentiate between blood- curdling and non blood-curdling yells. She said that if the yell was serious, one of the kids would eventually come over and tell them.
I was a little girl, from a family of four little girls, and we didn’t screech. I have no recollection of our mom teaching us not to screech; maybe she did. The last time I let out an involuntary yell was when my shoulder was frozen and my arm fell off the side of the bed; come to think of it, I think that was my first involuntary yell, too. My point? Um, I think it is that either not all girls screech, or it can be controlled if parents want to control it. My guess is they don’t bother these days, same as they don’t bother controlling their children in any of the other ways they let their kids negatively affect people around them in public.
I remembered this old thread when my wife just lay down for a much needed rest. There is a group of neighbourhood kids playing outside and one of them is a girl who periodically lets out a blood-curdling screech. The boys aren’t being quiet, but their shouts are communicating something and are short and not so high-pitched and EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE long. Ugh.
My parents had a rule about this. The rule was “Screaming and screeching are for when something is wrong and you need an adult NOW. If you scream, we will come running. If nothing is wrong when we get there, there will be Big Trouble.” It was an effective deterrent. I think it was a rule passed down from my grandfather, who had sensitive ears and four daughters and absolutely couldn’t stand screaming.
I missed this thread the first time around, so I’m kind of glad it was zombified. It made me realize something I’ve never noticed: my daughter’s not a screecher. (Nor was my son; he’s the next thing to an elective mute.)
I was a screecher. I hated it. I really wanted to stop being a screecher, but I couldn’t. I can’t explain why. It’s not like I planned to screech, thought about screeching, and let loose an ear splitting “eeeeEEEEEEeeeeeeEEEEE!”…it just came out. Like a sneeze, or a cough, completely without - nay, against - conscious intent.
I think I finally stopped screeching somewhere in my mid to late 20’s.
And, zombie or no, I’d like to respond to:
In a smaller group, or even a single kid in another room, the secret is the silence. A kid who’s hurt, more often than not, will hold his breath, wail, inhale loudly and deeply and then wail continuously. It’s the shock and silence that tells you it’s the real deal.
I was at a restaurant last night next to a booth containing a gaggle of Valley Girls.
I didn’t know there was such a thing as Valley Girls these days, especially in Ohio, but there they were, and they were LOUD.
Occasional screeching might have been preferable.
our rule was similar, but more succinct ‘if you are screeching, you’d better be bleeding.’ worked just fine. i really don’t understand parents who say, ‘there is nothing i could do’, or folk who ‘get tired of telling them.’
i wonder, tho, what it is that makes kids and some adjlts screech. is it a desire to broadcast their presence? a desire to affect others? an expression of - what? this afternoon two little girls were outside shrieking, and i asked my wife why kids scream like that. neither of us had any idea. but ime&o, a parent is fooling themselves if they say there is nothing they can do about it.
apologies for the lack of caps from my updated phone
I took my 2 nephews to the beach one day, intending a peaceful day for me of sunning and reading. Forget it. With what seemed like a thousand little girls screeching, I just constantly thought someone was drowning.
Just take solace in the knowledge that come the zombie apocalypse, the screechers will be the first ones taken.
Then it will be legal to shoot them.
Whenever I tell my daughter to stop screeching in my ear one of my sisters makes a snide remark at me along the lines of “Geez, she’s just being a kid and you sound just like you did when you were a kid in the home movies telling [someone else] to stop screeching in your ear” I have to explain to my sister that a)you only see her for 3 or 4 hours a week, I have to listen to her screech the rest of the time and b)I guess 25 years later, it still hurts when someone screeches 12 inches from my face. And it does, it physically hurts my ears when someone yells that loud, that close to my ears. It’s funny though, I do see myself in those old home movies saying exactly the same thing to a cousin or a neighbor kid who was being way too loud, but I also remember my dad saying the same thing as well.
Also, to people that don’t have kids or to all those aunts and uncles that that see parents trying to stop things that you might think are cute or kids just being kids. Some of them get really obnoxious when you have to deal with it a lot. People used to get downright angry with me when I’d tell my (at the time) 4 year old daughter to stop singing. “But it’s so cute, leave her alone”. “But you don’t understand” I’d reply “She sings like that for a good 5 or 6 hours a day, you might think it’s cute, but I’m about ready to cut my ears off”. “Oh, Joey, she’s fine, just leave her alone”…“No, really, it’s been 6 months, and she literally sings nonsensically like that all. day. long. it’s not cute anymore”.
I’ve heard boys screech too.
Not really, not in the same way at least. Let’s not pretend there is not an obvious sex difference in this type of thing. It manifests itself at a young age and there is little you can do about it. I love having just daughters because they are pretty easy in general. Mine aren’t big screechers these days and I correct them on it when they are.
However, when we have their birthday parties or other events, stand back and cover your ears because twenty young girls in a small area will blow your eardrums out as well as display plenty of other drama like faking injuries for attention, verbal backstabbing, and forming coalitions against each other. It is like a horrible reality show being scripted right in front of your eyes and it happens every time.
Groups of little boys will destroy your stuff, make lots of other types of noise like engine and battle sounds and possibly harm your pets, but they generally don’t screech.
Be glad they’re only young girls. There are adult women at my school who play soccer in the gym during lunchtime, and they’re always screeching. Drives me nuts.
I’m a woman, and I’ve never screeched. I’ve always been puzzled about why so many girls and women do it. My daughter isn’t a screecher either. There’s probably a solid little percentage of us non-screechers, but we get lost in the noisy crowd.
I suspect the Screech gene is co-inherited with the Pink gene. My Taller Girl has neither, though she did briefly flirt with both screeching and pinkification before deciding they were Not For Her. The Smaller Girl is the total opposite.
IME, I would generally side with the “girls screech and boys don’t” opinion. But that’s not to say they’re not loud. They’re just loud in a different way. Generally, when boys are loud it’s in a CONTINUALLY-TALKING-AT-THE-TOP-OF-THEIR-VOICE-AND-QUITE-FAST-SO-YOU-DON’T-GET-A-WORD-IN-EDGEWAYS-KIND-OF-THING. Whereas girls will be talking in normal voices and then something exciting or scary happens and suddenly SCREECH! and then five minutes later SCREECH again, which averages to about the same in the long term.
The neighbors frequently have parties and their friends have young girls who seemingly do nothing BUT screech, for hours on end. It is seriously non-stop screeching. I don’t want to get angry about it because they seem to be having fun, but it is INCREDIBLY obnoxious so I make sure to be away from the house as much as possible on those days.
God, yes. There is an adult woman working up the hall from me who shrieks about seventeen times a day. And she’s a wonderfully sweet person, I can’t understand why she hasn’t noticed everyone flinching whenever she opens her mouth.
I fantasize that if I ever leave this job, on my last day I’m just going to stand in the doorway and scream in that general direction.
I used to be a sound engineer. I worked plenty of concerts, for very loud bands with huge sound systems.
The loudest single noise I have ever encountered was at a Shaun Cassidy concert, at the peak of his career teen idol career at Kansas City’s Municipal Auditorium.
10,000 little girls, all shrieking at the tops of their lungs in a concrete bowl when he came out onto the stage. Louder than Ted Nugent at Arrowhead Stadium.