Neighbourly advice please

[Tinkerbell78]

Hi all,

I’m hoping for some advice please.
I’m sure this will be a topic that in some ways has been discussed before.

I live next door to the most adorable little boy age 4, mum & dad along with 3 other siblings. He is non verbal & has other learning needs. I don’t know exactly which, as I don’t know the family too well.
He communicates with his family in his own way and they’re all very loving towards each other.

There has been no issues to date other than the usual kids playing, crying, shouting noise, plus the tapping that the little boy does. He taps his toys in the garden and during he day he taps the walls downstairs which is fine by us. We honestly don’t mind at all. We are a family of 3 boys so I’m sure they will have heard us many a time!

The issue is this. The little boys bedroom adjoins my 9 year old sons. For the past 3-4 months the little boy has been banging & tapping the wall during the night which has been waking my son multiple times in the night. I have tried moving the furniture in the room to try an muffle the noise but it’s not working. He is going to school tired.

My son is 10 & understands that the little boy has trouble sleeping but he is beginning to get stressed and now want to sleep in our lounge so he gets some rest.
There are no other options or bedrooms I can switch him into unfortunately.

How on earth do I approach the Mum & Dad to try and sort this out? Do I even approach them? They must be stressed enough without me adding to it. But we can’t go on like this either. As I say I don’t know them too well so I don’t know how they would take me mentioning this.

Please, any advice will be appreciated.

Thank you in advance ❤️

Gosh, that is a tough one. Because he may not even need to tap the shared wall for that sound to travel. So next door might not be able to do any reshuffling of furniture either.

The difficulty with raising it is that there may be nothing that they can do.

I have actually been looking for sound absorbant doors recently. I wonder if any property experts elsewhere on Mumsnet would know if there's a decent physical solution in your case, because your boy is obviously suffering.

Sorry to not be more help. Hopefully more expertise will be forthcoming but maybe try property/DIY board?

There must be something his parents can fix to the walls in the boy's room that would stop the sound travelling through to your boy's room, some sort of covered foam perhaps like a thinner version of a cushion that meets safety standards of course.

In his parents' position I would want to know.

Even mice scampering can sound loud once amplified through the beams. It's bad luck that the tapping conducts so well through the house but it's quite possible the parents have no idea, so please tell them. There may be some way of rigging up a board around his bed that is insulated from the fabric of the house so the tapping doesn't conduct, or moving his bed may help. It doesn't need to be a full wall of proper soundproofing. Do you know if he's tapping the wall rather than his bedframe? If the latter then something as simple as moving his bed a few inches from the wall and adding rubber feet. Do both boys have carpet currently?