Neighbour complained to council about my 1 year old daughter

[Sykosocial]

Yes, exactly what the title says... I'm actually disgusted by the fact that my neighbour has made a complaint to the council specifically about my 1 year old daughter. Our daughter is a lively, playful and extremely happy little girl and she is very eager to get out of bed every morning. Sometimes the time is 5am when she wants to get out of bed and she does stand at her bedroom gate screaming (not crying, just screaming) to get our attention. As parents, we do have our routines and we are currently trying to get our daughter back into her 7pm-7am routine but at the moment she just wants to get out of bed early and play. I imagine this is because it's summer and the sun comes up early (we do have blackout curtains in her room though). We also do everything we can to get her to stay in bed for a little longer (e.g. giving her a bottle/water, watching baby sensory videos, getting a couple of her toys out) but they don't seem to work. So eventually we will give into her and get up and out of bed to start the day. However, I'm not willing to just give into her straight away for the sake of silencing her because she will then get into her head that getting up at 5am is fine and that goes against everything we've ever done when it comes to her routine. The lady who lives next door has lived in silence for the last 3 months that we've been in our property that we were 99% convinced that the property was empty until yesterday when I was made aware someone was in there and I went round to ask her very calmly if we could have a chat about it. Of course she slammed the door in my face. I'm under the impression that she lives alone and doesn't have any children herself, and I know the gentleman that lived the our property before us didn't have children either so I understand that the lady may not like living next door to a child who is doing normal child like stuff but surely she can't be making complaints to the council about a 1 year old making noise? And surely there is nothing the council can do? What if I had a colicky newborn in the house...? Would she complain about a newborn too? Someone please tell me that this woman is in the wrong here or should I be trying to get my child to be silent in her own home?

How long have you been letting your dd scream at 5am and waking your neighbour?

Maybe 7pm is too early for bedtime and your dd has had enough sleep by 5am.

Hello, we don't let her scream for long at all! She wakes between 5am - 6am (it pretty much changes daily but 5am is the time that was reported to the council). I'm quite a light sleeper anyways so any noises from my daughters room and my eyes are instantly open and we also have a monitor too which is on all night so really there's no way I could not hear her. Once we hear her we go in, try different things to settle her and if she doesn't settle then we do get up. Normally the time we get up is no earlier than 6am but we have been up and out of bed just after 6 most mornings for the past 3 weeks. So she's really not left for that long at all and as I said within the time that shes awake screaming, to the time we actually get out of bed, I have attempted different things to settle her back down (which in my opinion is just a normal thing parents do). She does go up stairs to bed at 7 but some times she does get her self back out of bed to play with her toys which she does quietly and happily and then when she's tired she gets herself back in bed and goes to sleep. Normally she's asleep no later than 9pm, which is around the time I also go to bed. So there's no way I can put her to bed any later than 9pm unless we all stay up.

What was the report for? Was it noise or neglect?

It was for noise

Read the post

So she screams from 5 to 6 am ?

No she doesn’t scream from 5 to 6 am. She wakes up between 5 to 6 am and when she does wake up she scream to get our attention and then we go straight in. I said all of this in the first post

What did the council say? Im sorry but this lady maybe needs a reality check. It might not suit her to hear a baby crying or screaming every so often but that's life I'm afraid. Its not always as simple as settling a baby or toddler, sometimes they cry no matter what you do. I don't see anyway of stopping that and if the council had any sense they would tell her so. If you get anymore complaints in id consider contacting the council about harassment. You should be living in fear of a complaint just going about normal family life xx

How many minutes of screaming though? you say it's not for an hour but that you also don't go straight away.

I was thinking exactly the same. I’m sorry but just because you don’t want her to think that you will go straight away and see to her now means she is adopting screaming as a behaviour. I’m sick of hearing children doi this and no it’s not normal!! You need to as a parent try more different things not blame the neighbour for disliking screaming you do not have a right to allow that kind of noise in your own home because you share space with the rest of society!! For god sake this is why this country has turned into the trash it has because of this lapse awful parenting.

Getting up at 5am is normal for a 1 year old though, she's far too young to understand you trying to get her to stay in bed. I agree you shouldn't do things just to silence her but I don't think this comes under that bracket. I think your neighbour could be more understanding but ultimately this is a conscious and possibly unreasonable decision by you to try to make a very young child stay in bed.