Our neighbours have complained about the noise caused by my two boys in our garden. They are age 10 and 7.
They were playing very happily (Top Trumps, as it happens) at the end of the garden furthest away from the house (and the neighbours' house) while I was indoors. I heard one of the neighbours shout, 'Oi!' but since I didn't hear anything else, I didn't think anything of it. A few minutes later, one of the neighbours yelled my name, then the other did. As I was indoors, and my boys were still playing happily, I just ignored it. A few minutes later one of them came round to say we were too loud and they were unhappy about it. He said I was reading aloud to the children and that he and his wife could hear every word. (I had been reading aloud to my children in the same part of the garden earlier in the afternoon but I wasn't doing so at the point when they complained. I don't think I was doing so any louder than the volume you'd use for a normal conversation.)
I don't think the problem is really me reading to the children. I think the problem is general noise. They have complained to us before on a number occasions about our noisy children. They are retired and don't have grandchildren, and there aren't a lot of other children living near us, so ours are the ones making all the noise that they hear. We also home educate and our boys are around and outdoors in the daytime more than the average children. We do lots of our structured lessons in the garden, and the neighbours have previously said they don't have a problem with us doing "quiet learning" out there. We don't have a TV and don't use electronic devices much, so our children do a lot of playing outdoors. It's been a long-standing problem, though the neighbours have complained about noise from indoors too. (We are two halves of a semi with only a thin wall between, and we have very echoey acoustics in our kitchen, and an open-plan layout downstairs.)
There isn't any goodwill on their part because they think we don't care and do nothing. The wife told us once she should be able to read a book in her garden at 6pm without hearing our children. They wrote to us once complaining about the noise, and complaining that we never told our children to be quiet. For the next 3 days, I did nothing different from normal but I made a note of every time I asked the boys to be quieter because of the neighbours. I did so 35-40 times a day (!), and that was pretty typical of what I was doing before they complained. We wrote back to the neighbours explaining that, but never had a response.
They don't wake up until 8.30am, and when they complained about noise from the garden before that, we stopped letting the boys out of doors until after 9am, and stopped eating breakfast in the garden. When the neighbours complained about noise from indoors, we spent £500 on sound insulation boards to go against our party wall. Unfortunately when we put the first one up, DS1 and I had an allergic reaction to something in it, and we had to take it off the wall and throw them away. We did tell the neighbours about that.
With garden noise, we always bring the children indoors as soon as they start fighting or stropping or screaming. I understand that people don't want to listen to bickering from over the fence (something else the neighbours have complained about in the past).
My children aren't especially quiet, but I don't think they're especially noisy either. My parents are always telling me how much quieter they are than my brother's 4 boys, for example.
If they're not behaving in an antisocial manner, I think it's fine for my children to be playing in their own garden and that I shouldn't be constantly on their case to play indoors, or to play with hushed voices. AIBU?