Will noisy neighbours disturb my newborn?

[pacific407]

I live in a flat and recently people have moved in above us who are quite noisy. Sometimes they make a lot of noise into the night. It isn't particularly loud, but does disturb me when I'm trying to sleep (although that's not difficult at the moment!)

My baby is due in March and I'm really concerned that their noise will disturb it and prevent it sleeping/wake it up.

Can anyone tell me what level of noise wakes up a newborn?

It might help in the long term as your child will be able to sleep through noise rather than just in a dark quiet room :)

When we had DS we ran a pub next to a railway station and lived above it and the noise never woke him up. But he got so used to the noise that he'd wake when everything went quiet.

The neighbours are fairly unlikely to disturb your newborn but they probably will disturb YOU when you are at your most sleep-deprived!

I used to literally want to kill our neighbours at times (who were actually the nicest people, and really fairly quiet in the scheme of things!) if they disturbed in the precious 90 bloody minutes when the baby was actually sleeping.

Newborn babies usually like a fair bit of noise in fact - what disturbs them is intense quiet punctuated by a sharp, surprising noise. So something like a door slamming, or a phone ringing may wake them, but pounding music or loud traffic usually doesn't.

It might be worth addressing the issue with the neighbours, but do bear in mind that newborn babies make a fair bit of noise at unsociable hours, so you may need their forbearance too..

It probably takes a lot of noise to wake most newborns, very generally are so zonked from the birth that they will sleep anywhere at anytime. It is a bit later on when it might be a problem and probably more for you, you will need all the sleep you can get. Our neighbours decided to knock most of their house down when I was pregnant with my second and it drove me crazy. Infact they day I went in to labour and was trying to "get in the zone", they started drilling really loudly for hours and I nearly killed them. (They did know we were having a homebirth as we dropped a note round.) Now they are having a baby and am thinking it might be time to get the loft converted. ;-)

Newborns can sleep through anything, and I took the approach that sleeping through noise is a good skill to have! Always had ds napping in the living room with radio/TV/people chatting as a newborn and have never gone down the silent, blacked out bedroom route. He's 6 months now and will sleep anywhere.

ds1 could sleep through a train coming through the room.
ds2 woke up at nothing.
dd slept through anything as well...

so it depends on baba - I think most of them sleep really soundly though.

It's never a good idea to creep around a sleeping baby btw - you have to live your life.

Sorry your neighbours are so noisy though.

Thank you all so much for your responses - this is my first time posting on mumsnet and I am now officially hooked (husband extremely happy I now have other people to bother with my endless worries!)

You've put my mind at rest.

Theyoungvisitor - I was going to say something to the neighbours but I decided it's probably best not to say too much about noise with a baby on the way! I also think I'm probably oversensitive to noise at the moment because I'm not sleeping well (better get used to that!)

Pacific, do they know you're pregnant? I only ask because we had really REALLY noisy neighbours before DS was born. I mean loud parties til 3am sort of noisy. Soon as they realised I was pregnant they stopped, without me having to say anything at all.

Depends on baby.

I've had the neighbours from hell: shouting, fighting and mostly loud thumping bass. I've even had noise abatement notices on a couple. The children slept through it all. I was the one who couldn't sleep.