A touchy Park Slope resident is sounding off about kids using their outdoor voices — when “playing outside.”
“Parents, please lower your voices when you are playing outside with your children,” the resident wrote in a passive-aggressive letter to their neighbor.
“I appreciate that you want to support your kids in all they do, but please refrain from whoops and shouts of encouragement.”
The recipient of the hostile missive — a mother of two young children — shared it in the private Facebook group Park Slope Moms.
The letter writer — a self-described “editor and writer” living in one of Brooklyn’s most expensive neighborhoods — detailed a typed litany of complaints.
“For most of my thirty years here … I have had the quiet enjoyment of my garden. But for some time now, you have compromised my enjoyment and my work on a daily basis,” they wrote, continuing: “Keeping intrusive sources of noise to a minimum is one way to show one another mutual respect.”
The mild-mannered tone gets snippier in the fourth paragraph:
“You may not have noticed, but quite often you are the only household within earshot making a considerable amount of noise outside.”
The killjoy, who presumably is childless, continued to air out their disdain for their pint-sized neighbors.
“I understand kids need to be kids, but please control your daughters from shouting and screaming. There are choices you can make to channel your child’s naturally boisterous energy without the sound of it filling the backyards of others.”
The neighbor-knows-best further advised: “Take them inside, go for a stroll, or take them to the playground or the park where they can be as uninhibited as they like.”
In her Facebook post, the mom, who revealed her kids were ages two and four, wrote: “They’re telling me to stop loudly praising them. Which kind of was the boost I needed today,” she wrote, according to the Daily Mail.
She then polled fellow parents to weigh in on the controversy.
“I love that they think taking their daughters inside is a good place to ‘channel their boisterous energy,'” one commenter wrote in the Park Slope Moms thread, sharing a similar experience they had with a testy neighbor.
“Look dude, if I had some magical quiet spell I would use it, okay? But he’s a toddler and he cries a lot. Sorry not sorry,” they wrote.
Another parent snarkily chimed in: “My husband also said he would relearn to play trumpet again outdoors.”
The writer/editor concluded the diatribe by saying the family is “certainly entitled” to enjoy their own garden.
“While noise is an unavoidable aspect of urban life, I hope all of us can agree that our home is our personal refuge in the city, and that we’re all entitled to its quiet enjoyment,” they wrote, signed: “Respectfully, Your neighbors.”
The neighbor didn’t get the last word, however.
A fired-up parent in the Park Slope Moms Facebook group wrote: “F**k them and continue whooping and shouting words of encouragement.”