Myself and my partner keep going backwards and forwards on this situation so hoping you can give some advice. Please read everything before giving the kneejerk 'call social services obviously' reaction.
We moved into our new house (terrace) early December and it became evident very quickly that the walls are very thin. Next door to us is a family with two boys aged 4 and 18 months. Both parents live at home. The grandparents regularly help in the daytime with childcare, the mum appears to work part-time. The dad leaves the house at 5am and returns about 3pm, the mum seems to work a few days a week in the afternoon only.
We don’t have children and I’ve done a lot of reading on this website of similar situations and have read very detailed posts from people working for social services saying that what I am about to describe is not cause to call social services and that doing so would make the children’s life worse.
The older child has a habit of screaming: constantly. And this isn’t using the word screaming to mean crying, I mean screaming often in short repeated blasts, sometimes for a long time. It often sounds like excited screaming but most of the time it seems like it is just ‘to make a noise’. It is incredibly loud. This starts from 6am and continues until they go to bed. I can’t tell you how frustrating this is to live next to, it is horrible.
The reasoning for this may be because the parents regularly scream at each other. They swear in front of the children, call each other the C word and last night were having an argument about how much they hate each other. This isn’t just ‘stressed’ arguing; it’s vindictive and nasty and they clearly dislike each other. We hear a lot through the walls and we have never heard laughter or kind words between them. Often when they shout at each other the son’s screaming gets louder and more pronounced.
When the dad looks after the children in the afternoon is when it is most disturbing (I work at home three days a week). The children often seem to be left unattended (a regular cause for the parents shouting at the children is ‘oh look what you’ve done’ or ‘why have you got all these out’ or ‘why have you made a mess’). Often if the children make noise I hear the dad running downstairs from the attic room to shout at them. And he really shouts at them. He roars ‘shut up’ at the absolute top of his lungs as well as telling the 4-year-old to ‘fuck off’. One of the most disturbing cases the son was crying and really crying, that sort of choke crying that sounds desperate and sad. The son kept repeating something over and over (I couldn’t hear what he was saying) and the dad did not comfort him and continued shouting. Their constant threat to the children is ‘oh you’ll go to your bed then’, not sure how productive this would be at 4.30pm.
The mum to her credit does try with them and is much less aggressive than the dad. She does scream at them but it seems to be when she’s reached the end of her tether; although this is often. She is most disturbing when she is arguing with the dad.
The children rarely leave the house and we have never seen them in the garden playing (even in the snow?). I thought the 4-year-old would be in some sort of schooling by this age (perhaps I am wrong?) We’ve seen him in school uniform only once and he went for two days, we haven’t noticed him going since. This may be because he goes on the days when I am in the office I’m not sure (although my days in the office move around each week)?
The Gran is no better at taking care of them and clearly you can see where the parenting style comes from; there is regular screaming and shouting.
We can not go round and ask if there’s ‘anything we can do’. Neither of us have children or have any knowledge of looking after them and to be honest because of their temperaments we avoid them as much as possible. What is strange is they MUST know we can hear them. In the daytime I have radio on; hang the washing out etc, so they must know I am home. I.e. they must not care what we can hear? I’ve thought of maybe going round and complaining about the noise and being very clear that the noise is not the children (often their screaming arguments are 12.30 at night etc).
One cause for concern is that if we reported them there is no doubt that they would know it was us who reported them. Obviously, the safety and wellbeing of the children is number one priority but I have to take into consideration that they are not the nicest characters (as you can see above) and could potentially make our lives very difficult and miserable being neighbours and sharing access. I definitely fear confrontation from them and what they would do if they guessed it was us who reported them. Please don’t think badly on me for raising this as an issue, it could potentially make our lives very hard and very miserable in a house we bought less than 6 months ago. We thought of perhaps calling the boys school and reporting a concern confidentially? Would this work?
Another outcome of this is that we have not slept past 6am since moving in to the house. The mornings seem to be particularly fraught, the boy screams his head off for 2 hours as the mum screams at him. For those of you with children you must be used to the constant early mornings, but it is extremely frustrating for us.
Basically; are these children being abused or is this just a sad case of an unhappy home? I feel for the mother to be honest, I imagine financially she can’t get away from the husband who is just so awful. Realistically do I believe that social services would take these children away from the parents: no. so what would they do? I cannot imagine the father caring a jot for a ‘parenting course’ or similar things that have been suggested as the outcome of calling social services.
Any thoughts would be welcome.