22 October 2023 , 06:00
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A nasty note from neighbours threatening to call police over the noise her toddler makes at bedtime has left a mother feeling extremely stressed. An American woman said on Reddit that while she has tried "everything" to keep her toddler's noise down, the furious couple next door sent a letter demanding that she keeps her son quiet, or face a police officer at her door every night when he starts running around before bed at 8.30pm.
The worried mum explained on the subreddit Mildly Infuriating that she suspected her son has autism as he struggles with understanding basic commands. And while many of the site's users were sympathetic to her plight, others questioned why the three-year-old child's folks weren't doing more to stop their son running around, or buying mats and rugs to dampen down the noise.
Some users said that it was unlikely the police would take a noise complaint about a toddler seriously, especially at 8.30pm in the evening and the mother insisted: "He doesn't even make noise past 9pm because that's his new bedtime and he's in his room. Originally he was going to bed at 9:30 but we started putting him in there an hour earlier so he'd be settled in sooner because we felt bad.
"I'm beyond frustrated and we have tried to be accommodating, but at this point, they seem to want me to strap my three-year-old down or carry him while we do his bedtime routine." She said when the police had visited the mother in the past, an officer simply told her: "Oh I have twin girls! Have a good night."
Frustrated, she said in her post that "they're literally going to be wasting police resources on a mum with a three-year-old – our police department is already severely understaffed. What do they want them to do? Arrest a toddler?"
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She also informed users that these neighbours had even come to her door at 10pm to complain, but the woman and her partner checked their area's rules and found that noise ordinance kicks in at 10pm – meaning they are complying with the law. The stressed-out mum added: "He's asleep by then so we are doing nothing wrong. At this point we just have to let them call."
In the woman's defence, Redditors advised: "If the rule is 10pm, perhaps get a printout of that and put it on their door. That way they also know the rules." While another tried to comfort her by saying: "Before 11 the chances of cops showing up to anything but the most invasive noise complaints is slim. The chances of your neighbours not being chewed out to hell by a very, very annoyed cop if they somehow even show up is also very low. You should be fine."
And one user doubted that the complaint would get as far as police actually showing up: "I think it’s pretty likely neighbours will get chewed out by the operator of the non-emergency line if they continuously call in these complaints," they said. "Hard agree that the cops probably won’t show up, I doubt this complaint would make it past the operator unless neighbour severely exaggerates or just straight up lies."
But not everyone took the mum's side – saying she may not be so blameless after finding a buried comment reply where she admitted her toddler was waking up the neighbours' baby: "Having an infant woken up is very infuriating, imagine having that happening every single night."
Others advised the mother to invest in rugs and mats to help dampen the sound if she has wooden floors, while another said the issue must have come to a head if the neighbours complained on a daily basis.
They wrote: "There is clearly something wrong here because toddlers can be trained for bedtime and it is very unusual to have neighbours knock on your door every day to complain about a noisy child. No matter how you put it there is a parenting issue."