Comment by gspencley
8 days ago
> and the laughter of children
This I will take a nuanced position on. If your kids are playing in the backyard, and it doesn't impact me at all ... perfect please enjoy life.
But I can often hear people outside, especially children screeching and yelling, over my television with all of my doors and windows shut and the air conditioner on full blast.
In those scenarios, the laughter IS adversely affecting the ability of other people to enjoy their own property.
Sometimes I hear dogs barking and loud cars on the street. Or just the constant drone of weed whackers and leaf blowers from about april to october. I have triple glazed windows and eight inch thick walls so I don't hear any of it when I go inside.
children screeching and yelling, provided that it isn't going on for hours at a time or in the middle of night, is just a normal consequence of living in a community.
I do feel for people who move in next to schools or public pools/playgrounds but considering how much time kids spend indoors these days I'd guess that people today have it much easier than people did in the past.
I'd much rather have to occasionally be reminded that kids are somewhere playing and having a good time than deal with a lot of the other noises that can disrupt a person's day like loud cars/motorcycles, drunk people fighting, landscapers or sirens.
If you move next to a playground you should know what you're doing. My parents live next to a school on purpose and we all enjoy the sounds of children when we're out in the yard. Recess isn't even that long and always happens in the middle of a weekday.
> children screeching and yelling, provided that it isn't going on for hours at a time
But it does often go on for hours at a time. And I'm not talking about a school zone or a park. As another person pointed out, if you move next to a school or a park you know what you are signing up for. But in a quiet suburb, if the issue is new neighbours that weren't there when you bought the house.. or who just started a family recently. That's something that's being imposed on you that didn't exist before.
And we don't tolerate this when it is barking dogs or loud music. Most cities have noise ordinances and I even read mine because of problematic neighbours. Not because of children, mind you. The man was an alcoholic who would get drunk early in the morning and go into his backyard where he would have loud screaming matches with hallucinations which terrified our small daughters so I wanted to know if the noise ordinance covered it. Answer is, technically yes but the police don't enforce yelling and hollering despite it being spelled out in the letter of the bylaw.
Why is it acceptable to expect people to keep their pets quiet, their music at a reasonable volume, their power tools and machinery at bay and to not have extremely loud parties where people are screaming and blasting noise ... but the second it's loud children we're talking about oh no ... you just need to learn to "live in a community"?
You can make the same argument about anything. Living with neighbours who have tall grass is part of "living in a community." Some people don't care about well trimmed lawns. Motorcycles with extremely loud engines, just part of "living in a community." Barking dogs. Honking car horns etc. etc. etc. We have noise ordinances for a reason; noise directly affects other people.
And I say all of this as a parent who raised two daughters to adulthood. I don't understand this weird standard. We (their mother and I) always expected our children to be respectful of our neighbours.