and that sirens can signal the milk let-down reflex.
wow.
jb
I thought it was just the annoying girls in my neighborhood. About a year ago my son had his finger caught in a door and cut off (the doctors where able to reattach it) and of course he screamed.
Now every time I hear a child scream my heart stops and I run to see what the problem is. When the girls are playing near my house I end up running outside constantly:mad:
Good for you, Anachronism. 
As Broomstick detailed above, screams of delight and screams of terror are almost indistinguishable.
If more adults were so ‘paranoid’, more kids would be safe.
Peace,
mangeorge
OK -
a theory:
females are more vocal than males.
I recall hearing something about women speaking 6,000 words/day vs. 2,000 words/day for men.
Sound right? (it would explain the “yes, dear” and other auto-responses by the male - he has lost track of whatever she is talking about, but feels obliged to say something).
Are little girls just “revving up” for a lifetime of chatter? (volume control and channel selection circuitry to be added later)
I have 3 girls, and there’s not much that can be done except to tell them to play in the basement and close the door (or play outside, just go to someone else’s house to scream).
I don’t think little girls are noticeably more noisy than little boys. Small children are generally noisy, and I believe this is a holdover from the prehuman phase of our evolution during which we were living in the open. If mothers and kids got separated, then there was a benefit to the kid having a REAL LOUD voice in that the mother could find the kid by listening. (I don’t think fathers really did much in those days as far as raising the kids was concerned).
But at my apartment house the loudest by far are some boys whose voices have just changed.
I have noticed there are also a few BABIES who have a pitch that comes close to those Jurassic Park creatures in the films.
Not often, but I have turned around in supermarkets and public places to see what the hell that noise was, only to see this teeny baby making the loudest, strangest noise I have ever heard! It is not crying - it is an unnatural screech that obviously even embarrasses the parents.
But back to the OP…I worked at a private school for kids between 12-17. The more excited (happy) the girls got, the louder the screams. Soon you were able to tell if the scream was for joy (won a contest or sporting event) or for gossip (dude kissed so-and-so last night) or loudest of all, the upcoming whatever (dance/outing/shopping trip). Seems the thrill of anticipation causes shrillest noise - at least in my limited, anthropological boarding school experience.
The 4 YO boy who lives above me shrieks at least as loudly (and much more often) than any girl I’ve been around.
Certainly little boys are noisy too. Get a few of them rampaging around the house and you REALLY know about it. However, it is the way that girls shriek and scream when they are HAPPY that disturbs me (and sets of the dogs in the street to barking too).
Anyway, I’m happy now 'cos they’re all at school! It won’t start up until 3.45 pm, and by then I’ll be far, far away at work, listening to the cackles and squeals from the ladies sharing gossip in the tea-room!
As a young boy most the of the games I played with the boys involved being really quiet, sneaking around, hunting lizards, bugs and other wildlife or just explorering the jungle or racing. All of which it was either an advantage not to make noise or pointless to do so. Probably the most common noise I made as a little boy was “R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-oom room. R-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-R-R-R-R-R-R-R(downshift)r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-r-R-R-R-R-R-R-R-screeeeeeech.”
Whereas my sister and all her girl friends played … um … a lot of house and stuff, I don’t know what they played but they were always squealing, giggling and annoying me to no end.
Whenever we played games together like tag and freeze tag and such the boys tended to stick to their method of playing and girls to theirs.
These I find to be generally true but certainly not strict rules to the acts. Although my nieces are certainly living up to it, especially the littlest one, yeesh.
I should say the most common sound I ever heard from my sister and her friends as a little girl was dialog, “Blah blah blah Mr. Teddy.” Which made for some pretty quiet times. Only occasionally did she scream and yell.
She did grow up to having the odd habit of walking around doing random things like washing the dishes or petting the cat and let fly one of the most blood curtleing scream you’ve ever heard. Apparantly the feeling just “came up on her.” This was aged 18 and 19. Luckily I had moved out by then.
Seems to me this must be a recent (evolutionarily speaking) phenomenon. I would think that an animal whose young constantly ‘cried wolf’ would be selected against. The adults wouldn’t have time to hunt or gather if they had to be continously running after the children. Or else they would learn to ignore the screams, including the real ones.
Or can parents somehow tell which are screams of joy and which are distress signals? I certainly can’t.
You’re probably right, Kalashnikov. Cave mothers kept thier children close, I think. Crying wolf probably got them a smack upside the head. We don’t SUTH anymore. And the wolves are dressed as men.
Cave pops was out making more cave babies.
I always turn to Manwatching by Desmond Morris when a question like this comes up. Here’s what he has to say about this in condensed form:
- Adult men tend to scream when in pain, but are less likely to do so in response to panic or fear.
- Children and adult females scream when in pain or in moments of panic and fear.
- When men do scream in fear or panic, their voices tend to be drowned out by the high pitch of children or adult female screams. (Think about being on a roller coaster)
- Screaming during play is a natural response to a pretend threat - being chased or surprised by a playmate for example. The children are just enjoying the thrill of a “safe” kind of danger.
I’ve got news for ol’ Desmond Morris. I’ve heard two men (points 1 & 3) scream in utter panic. They knew they were going to die. They didn’t, but their screams were loud and shrill, just “like a woman”. One fell from a cliff, and the other had a 12ga, compliments of my lunatic cousin, pressed against his eye.
I don’t blame either of them.
Only two examples, but it’s all I got.
Peace,
mangeorge
Gee Mangeorge - you sound like a fun guy to be around.
If I recall, “mangeorge” is actually a fun gal
Anyhoo - I play games in the air with a wide range of men, in emotional states from egomania to pants-pissing fear. In a true panic, as in I-really-think-I’m-gonna-die, men are capable of hitting the upper soprano registers just as much as the women. But they have to be really scared. Which would support the “emergency channel” theory of shrill voices.
My Mum (was a primary school teacher so that may have something to do with it) forbid us to scream. I’m a girl and have two sisters, no brothers, so although the play often got loud, there was no screaming. We were told that we should save our screaming for when we really needed it, in an emergency. So I’ve grown up dying to tell little girls to stop screaming and save it for an emergency!
Nah, I’m a maledude. Gentle as a kitten, though. I just like compound names.
Both instances are ancient history.
Skywalker was some clown who thought he could climb in his loafers. He fell straight down 15 - 20ft, then slid down a steep slope, head over heels, another couple hundred feet to the bottom. People called him ‘meatball’ from then on. He looked like one. I did not nudge him.
And the cousin is safely (for us) tucked away in a famous mandatory hotel in CA. The object of his attention was killed a few months later, trying to rip-off another drug dealer. Karma, eh?