Screaming Child (ASD)

[BlackBean2023]

I feel I ABU but honestly, it’s driving me potty.

we have neighbours who have moved in three doors away who have a child of about 7 who I believe is ASD. He loves being in the garden and jumping on his trampoline - if it’s not raining, he’s bouncing!

however he is also almost constantly stimming vocally and it sounds like a constant scream. I’m not exaggerating when I say constant. It’s stopping us enjoying our garden, I can’t work from home with the back doors open as it can be heard on a teams call it’s so loud.

I know there’s nothing I can do, and I should think of his parents, but I miss the quiet calm of my garden in the sunshine

Buy a directional microphone. He wont be heard on teams with it.

As much as I understand noise intolerance and I am sorry you are having difficulty with this i think this situation is part of living in a community and showing compassion and understanding for one another. Really any of us can have neighbours who move in and are loud however this child is trying to regulate and vocal stims can feed in to that as they may be under or over stimulated. Mum may have few options if the garden is this child's safe space and maybe there are siblings and limited space for stimming. I think maybe you are best trying to organise sorting your garden in school hours and using headphones to get on with your day. Headphones might be a minor inconvenience to you but stopping him going on a trampoline in the garden might be a big event for the child and may cause him to have meltdowns and end up hurting himself. This sounds like it presents as quite an obvious learning disability this is not a parenting issue or an issue with not respecting neighbours this is not having the capacity to understand that your need to stim trumps someone else's need for silence.

What i find concerning on a mothers forum is the lack of compassion from other posters for what is quite clearly a child with a disability.
This mother very likely already feels stressed and isolated as do lots of parents with special needs children do and I think this thread is really quite sad that this stigma for having a child with a disability is a burden for society. The truth is what actually makes a civilised society is how we treat our most vulnerable members and quite frankly these mothers and fathers need a medal for the sacrifices they make daily for their children to thrive and be happy.

Or we could call an idiot an idiot

Well its intersting people insist that those with severe/ profound disabillities havent increeased
Just going off my own LA there are four special schools all four have doubled in capacity over the past 10/15 years to meet the growing needs of children with complex needs
In my LA we have a large ethnic minority population where familial marriage.is quite common i think this needs to looked at .

This thread is clearly split into:

group A - he’s got SEND so no boundaries could ever be put in place. He’s regulating and has a right to do that noon till night no matter how loud.

group B - even children with SEND should be taught boundaries and hearing screaming in the garden all day long would push anyone to their limit.

FWIW I can see both sides and have a DSS who is autistic and whilst he doesn’t scream he does make a loud and near constant vocal stim (a sort of Eeeee sound) that has at points driven me up the wall (particularly when sleep deprived after having a baby). We can’t and wouldn’t dream of stopping him doing it completely but we also wouldn’t let him do it at full volume on the trampoline all day (the trampoline is one of the places he gets quite loud vocally) and have put in place boundaries with him about not doing it loudly at the dinner table, in people’s faces, around animals or very young children etc. fortunately as he is verbal we are able to teach him such things, but I honestly think even if he was non-verbal we wouldn’t let him scream constantly next to our neighbours. If you’re 3 doors down I shudder to think how bad it is for the immediate neighbours.

All of this

OP isn’t making the noise so she can’t solve it. He shouldn’t be outside so much. I bet the other neighbours are sick of it as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them have spoken to the parents. It’s not all about him. A whole road / neighborhood can’t revolve around 1 person, plus statistically there will be other people around with additional neurodiversity, mental health and physical health needs

They could take them inside, just as you'd (hopefully) do with any child who is screaming inside a restaurant/cafe/cinema

The people I've talked to who have disabled adult children in their 30s (so not even 40s) all their kids went to residential schools.

I also was reading there's been a real rise in severely disabled children and every single special school I've spoken to have said they used to mostly be MLD and some SLD and PMLD and now cohorts are much, much more likely to have more severe learning disabilities.

Yes i have heard the same thing

@Puzzledandpissedoff actually, one person with a moderate LD who will be mid 30s now went to mainstream and stayed at home whole childhood but they didn't have significantly challenging behaviour or co-occuring serious mental health issues and were verbal and could use toilet.

Op I would do a combination of trying to block the noise out and maybe asking the parents for some compromise. It’s not unreasonable to want peace in your home but if the child is disabled and screaming all day they are struggling way more than you are.

Also and this is anecdotal i m 52 and left school in 1990 i did my work experience in around 1989 in a day centre for disabled children ,from my understandung these children ironically had a aimilar level of disabllity to my own child now ,but non of them appeared to have a place at a special school bearing in mind i was 15 so didnt question it
My own child has been in a special school since reception

I've been told that my children would have been some of the "most disabled" in their special school 20 years ago except a handful of PMLD. Even then, 20 years ago most of the PMLD would have been in a separate special school (we have a couple near us which are pretty much specifically for this need). Now, they are on the more able side for the school cohort and one is nonverbal.

Same as my children, since reception.

Interesting, so those children were educated in the day centre? Or have I got that wrong?

Im not sure
I could be wrong but from what i understood some children were classed as uneducatable and therefor it wasent deemed necesssary to provide rbem with a school
So the day centre and i think it was run by volunteers waa all they had.

Yes, my DS went to a special school too, but when a PP said they were "shipped off to institutions or locked away in basements or attics if kept at home", I must admit that such excellent schools aren't quite what came to mind - and while as you'd expect that school had some very severely affected students there was hardly any screaming there either

I agree, though, that even allowing for the improvement in diagnosis there seem to be far more children affected now and very genuinely wonder why.
As you said there are clearly some issues in your own area which contribute to this and I agree again that this needs addressing, but the increase seems to be everywhere and better minds than mine would be needed to understand this

Yep.

Pretty much all children with disabilities used to be classed as 'uneducatable' and not educated at all until the law changed.

As a parent of an autistic DS I'd have done what I could if a neighbour complained about noise.

However, at one point trampolining was one of the few methods DS had for regulating, so the choice was that or an extra meltdown, which I assume was also disruptive to at least our immediate neighbour (they very politely said they'd not noticed anything when I went to apologise and explain) as it involved a lot of screaming, shouting, swearing and banging (and the occasional trip to A&E for me). It really was a lose-lose situation for our neighbours noise wise.

We were also begging for help and support from anybody we could find to ask, so it's not like we were just allowing it for an easy life.

Although there must have bern some special schools
There was a very intersting documentary on BBC i player about how children from the carribean were treated very unfairly
When they emigrated with their families and had educational tests to see where they should be placed
Unfortunatley the tests didnt take into account language barriers or cultural differences
One example i remember was children being asked where the tap was and many couldnt idenrify it so were seen as being ubable to identify common objects
But apparently a tap is commonly known as a pipe in those countries and oncd asked where the pipe was most kids identified ir.

Of the top of my head -

Autism has a genetic component, so perhaps more autistic people are having children.

I believe age of father is a risk factor, so if people are having children later, that could increase the number.

Correlation rather than variation causation here, but pre-eclampsia appears to lead to an increased chance of the baby being autistic, and pre-eclampsia rates are increasing.

(The latter is interesting to me, as it appears it's possible there's a link between the fact I had ME/CFS as a teenager, developed HG and pre-eclampsia in pregnancy and now have an auto immune disorder. My DS is also autistic, and it's been suggested I should be assessed, though waiting list times make it unlikely that will ever happen.)

Yes severely disabled children become severely disabled adults. I live near a care home for disabled adults and a fair few of them are autistic, they are taken out every week to Tesco and some of them make loud high-pitched noises/shout/stim. What is your ‘solution’ exactly??

I was institutionalised for quite a while and this is exactly how it was, right down to the pretending for the inspectors. CQC don't do a thing. I wish more people were aware that locking people up like this is absolutely not a thing of the past. Thank you for keeping an eye out.

I really wouldn’t know what they tried, would I? They might think work best but it’s unlikely to be the only thing. What does he do at school? Can he use a mini trampoline inside? Would a swing help? What does he do when it’s raining?

If he is screaming for hours I’d question if it is actually regulating him and it is over stimulating him.

Jeez I could not live with that it would drive me mad. YANBU op. I’d be looking to move house.

It may very well be the only thing they've found works best at home. I'm sure if they had found something else that reduced the screaming, that's exactly what they would be doing as it isn't going to be pleasant for their ears either.

Depending on the size of their house, a mini trampoline is a good suggestion but I imagine the size needed for a 7 year old would involve having a good sized house with plenty of space and storage when they may already have other equipment such as a special needs buggy, other sensory equipment etc to have room for and store somewhere.