Here's a thing. Younger than 4ish and kids generally need comforting but quite honestly (and other parents may do it differently of course) there comes a point where you have to let them cry it out and learn that they need to stay in bed and go to sleep. That, in my experience, is usually when they are talking well, nearly old enough for school but still fairly little and toddlerish. If you keep comforting them they never learn to self-settle and you end up with disrupted sleep for everyone for years to come. We have friends where their 4 year old kid sleeps with them, still breast feeds on demand and basically dictates the bedtime routine and no one gets a proper nights sleep, not even the child. Not happening in my house. Not had to do it with my son (4) yet but we had a hell of a struggle with my daughter (who's now nearly 9). I will sit with them until they go to sleep, read bedtime stoies, have a chat about the day, comfort them if they have a night terror or are poorly but if they are just chancing their arm for a bit of a snuggle then they get told to go back to bed and go to sleep. Come back for a snuggle at a reasonable time and I'm the snuggle-meister! So long as the child is not ill, in pain, doing something dangerous (my daughter used to pile up teddies and climb over the baby gate!) or getting so distressed it becomes self defeating sometimes you have to zone them out and let them work out what's what. Give 'em an inch and they'll take a mile. A few bad nights early on will lead to much better nights overall later on. Of course as a neighbour it's horrible to have to listen to but then sometimes I think were are insulated from what family life is like because we no longer live in tents and shelters with no sound proofing at all. It's the same with kids having tantrums in supermarkets and restaurants. For the other people it's horrendous but for the parents is can sometimes be the last straw and they just let them have the tantrum and zone it out because it's the 500th tantrum that week.
You are right about that, that is something I honestly didn't think about at that time. However, as you say, the child was crying really desperately and loudly. Wouldn't you as a parent go check on them if it lasted an hour? And if it was waking up neighbors (which of course, you can't know for sure, but this was easy to guess)... That is why I went to knock on the doors when I started to feel omething was strange. I spent a few minutes there, ringing and knocking. As a responsible adult, wouldn't you go answer that? It then becomes obvious it's waking the neighbors! I only decided to call when nobody was really answering. I may have overreacted a bit, but how could I have known that there isn't a mother with the kid who collapsed for exaple and that's why the girl was crying out without a stop "Mommy, mommy!" I recently saw a case where a women called a police when the dog was barking all day in an appartment, when it usually doesn't as she worried about the man living there. Sure enough, he had diabetes and was in a bad shape and she saved him basically. Something along those lines was actually the first think I thought about after I realised something wasn't as it should be. But it was probably just the girl home alone. I also then heard the mother interacting with the daughter, no grandma there. But it is a good point to share, thanks.
I've called the cops two times in my life. On a night out with friends I noticed a distressed woman sat in a phone box. I gently pulled the door open and offered help but that made her worse. So I went into the next call box, called the police and requested a female PC as I felt me being male maybe wasn't helping. We stayed on the scene so she didn't run off, my female friends tried to comfort her but they weren't any better than me. When the police arrived (one a WPC) they took over and off we went. To this day I've no idea what had happened to her or what happened after. Didn't want to bother the police the next day but I still think about the incident from time to time and hope things worked out OK. Another time some muppet shot at us and our dog with an airgun (missed us but we sensed/heard the pellet go past). So I counted which window I saw him duck back into and called the cops in and directed them to which flat it was. Unlucky for him I recognised what had happened and the silhouette of an airgun when I see one. Again no idea what the outcome of that was. yes I am a hero...almost the same as a serving police officer in many regards..better maybe because I do what I do for free.
Yeah. Good point. We made a point of apologising to neighbours if we had a "challenging" night with the kids and if they've had kids themselves are usually understanding. But yeah...I might ignore a crying child but not someone knocking on the door.
