I'm kind of curious where people stand on something so I'm asking here to get a broad range of opinions.
If you live in a residential, suburban area (we're talking houses so close they're practically touching) what is an acceptable time frame for kids to be outside taking into account the consideration of your neighbours and the typical noise associated with playing children, e.g. balls bouncing, banging and clanging, laughing, yelling etc.
So in your view, how early is too early and how late is too late?
13 Replies
If they're screaming then noise laws apply, 7am to 10pm or whatever it is. If they're just being kids then they're allowed in their own yard. In my street they all go in at dinner time and they're not around on school mornings.
9am weekends until dark. After school until dark.
Before 7am is too early and after 10pm is too late
If you're living in a lock down area have a bit of leniency. It would be hard having kids home from school/daycare/activities they go a little crazy. Cut the parents some slack.
I wouldn’t be happy if it was happening before 7am and after about 8pm. As long as they aren’t screaming and yelling for the sake of it. I would prefer happy kids playing outside than construction noise.
Same I'm not happy when my neighbours start up music at 8pm right at my kids bedtime. Or in summer when my kids go to bed and you can hear the kids still playing outside. Nothing I can really do about it though, 8pm is quite early to other people.
Construction noise is the worst! We had night road works go on for 6months outside our apartment block. The entire building vibrates every night. There was nothing we could do about it.
We had to live with construction noise for about 18 months, maybe 2 years, while a train line went in and station around the corner, including night work. Trains having been running for about 3 or 4 years now, and it didn’t take long for me to tune them out. In the past year we’ve had 6 houses built on the block next door to us. 5 of the houses no major issues, bit noisy at times but we were able to put up with it. The 6th house on the hand is directly next door to us. Tradies would often be on site from 5.30am and have power tools running from soon after 6am. Council regulations say they can’t be onsite until 6.30am and no power tools until after 7am. None of the neighbours feel particularly friendly towards the family now living there.
Anything between 7am and 10pm is fine by me.
There will be people working from home at the moment who think kids should be quiet in business hours.
If I need to sleep during those hours or I need quiet for a zoom meeting or whatever there are ways I can achieve that from within my home.
The rules for my kids
Not out before 9am on the weekends and school holidays.
School mornings they can go out for a quick play if they're ready for school, so probably around 8am but I expect them to be reasonably quiet at that time of day.
Winter they're in by 5pm, by then it's pitch black and freezing where we live so they wouldn't want to be out after then anyway.
Summer, I'm usually starting to round them up and get them inside by 7.30 - 8pm just in consideration for our elderly neighbours and the neighbours who have babies/toddlers.
My old neighbours used to have their kids out screaming the place down at dead on 7am right up until 10pm (sometimes later). I know they were technically within their rights to do that, it still felt kinda disrespectful and inconsiderate though.
I had similar rules for my boys when they were younger and liked to play in the backyard. My youngest would scream if big brother so much as touched him during their game. The way he would carry on, you would think someone was seriously hurting him when he was barely touched. It’s surprising we didn’t have the police turn up on the doorstep to find out what was going on. I stomped on that noise pretty quickly! I didn’t want to hear that noise and I’m sure the neighbours didn’t want to either.
We have a rule for our kids that they’re not to go out before 8am on a weekday and 9Am on the weekend.
Unless the neighbour has once again had an exceptionally loud party which kept us up most of the night, then they can go out at 7am and scream their lungs out 😂😂
Sun up to sun down 😁