The Sound of Children Playing Is Not Industrial Noise

In the heart of Bairro Alto, the epicentre of Lisbon’s nightlife, stands a nursery that has been caring for the city’s children since 1834. In 2022, a resident complained to the city council — not about the bars whose noise fills the neighbourhood at night, but about the sound of children playing in the nursery’s courtyard during the day. Three years of municipal pressure on the Casa de Infância dos Calafates followed. The institution, run by a non-profit foundation and caring for some 130 children under six, installed an acoustic canopy over the courtyard at its own expense; it was deemed insufficient. Among the measures then suggested was that the nursery pay for double-glazed windows in the complainant’s flat. In December, an opposition councillor revealed that the municipality’s own measurements place the nursery at just over 40 decibels by day, comfortably within the 65 that the law allows, while the surrounding block registers around 70 at night. No penalty has ever been imposed, but the pressure continues.

We live in a time of contradictions. Across the Western world we worry about declining birth rates, ageing populations, and the sustainability of the welfare state, and yet we are becoming less and less tolerant of children and of those who raise them. The two things are connected: there are fewer children, so many adults encounter them rarely; the less we are exposed to them, the less prepared we are to accept the ordinary sounds they make; and we grow accustomed to certain silences and begin to mistake them for the norm. Hence the spread of self-declared “no-kids zones” — more than 500 in South Korea alone — a “child-free” trend now reported in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Italy. The appeal of adult tranquillity is understandable, and a private café that turns children away is at least exercising a commercial choice. What is happening in Lisbon is different in kind: a public authority is applying environmental noise regulation — an instrument designed for factories, traffic, and nightclubs — to the sound of children in a space that exists precisely so that they can play.

What other countries have already learned

Lisbon is not the first city to point a sound meter at a nursery. In Hamburg, neighbours sued the small kindergarten “Marienkäfer”, and in 2005 a court ordered its closure at its original site; when it reopened elsewhere, it did so behind a 60-metre noise-protection wall built to appease the new neighbours. It was emblematic of a wider wave: just as Germany expanded childcare on a national scale, residents discovered that the Federal Immission Control Act made no distinction between children and industrial noise, and by early 2011 the municipal associations were warning that neighbour litigation threatened the expansion itself. So in July 2011 the federal legislature amended the statute. Under section 22(1a) of the Immission Control Act, noise caused by children at daycare centres, playgrounds, and similar facilities is, as a rule, not a harmful environmental effect, and industrial limit values may not be applied to it. The reasoning was simple: the sounds children make are an expression of their development, and society owes them a particular tolerance. German civil courts have since carried the same logic into private law. The question that Lisbon’s services have spent three years measuring is one that German law now forbids anyone to ask.

Tokyo travelled the same road. A daycare centre in Nerima Ward built soundproof walls that worked indoors but could do nothing about the courtyard, and in 2011 neighbours sued under the metropolitan ordinance’s 45-decibel ceiling. In 2015, the metropolitan government amended the ordinance so that the numerical limits no longer apply to the voices of young children and their carers, explaining that a rule written against pollution had been reaching things it was never meant for.

In Austria — where the mayor of Völkermarkt once proposed building a wooden wall in front of a kindergarten to placate a single couple — there is still no federal statute, only a patchwork: several provinces, Upper Austria and Carinthia among them, have written into their building codes that noise from the normal use of playgrounds, childcare facilities, and schools is not a harmful environmental effect, and the Supreme Court has held that playground noise is not, in principle, a legal disturbance.

Even the cautious version carries a lesson. The Netherlands legislated quietly in 2010, excluding children’s voices — only their voices, and only around the school day — from the noise standards applicable to primary-school playgrounds and daycare centres; in 2015 the Council of State duly held that the sounds of children playing, as distinct from speaking, still count towards the limits. A carve-out drafted timidly may invite exactly the litigation it was meant to end.

Switzerland never legislated at all, its Federal Supreme Court holding in 2010 that residential zones are also meant for children, and that the noise of a crèche must in principle be tolerated there.

The pattern repeats across these countries, though the legal routes differ: a federal statute in Germany, national secondary legislation in the Netherlands, provincial building codes in Austria, a metropolitan ordinance in Tokyo, case law in Switzerland. The destination is always the same: the sound of children is not an emission to be metered. And each reform was preceded by its own Calafates — a particular nursery, a particular complainant, a particular authority reaching for the sound meter because the statute told it to. The conflict is created not only by unusually intolerant neighbours but also by noise laws that are blind to the source of the sound, and it will recur wherever such laws remain in force.

A one-sentence remedy

Nothing in European Union law stands in the way of a remedy. The Environmental Noise Directive harmonises only the assessment and mapping of ambient noise from transport and industry; neighbourhood noise lies outside its scope, noise limit values remain a national choice, and schools appear in the Directive only among the noise-sensitive places to be protected — never as sources. Meanwhile, under the revised Barcelona targets), the Union asks Member States to place at least 45 per cent of under-threes in early childhood education and care by 2030 — while leaving untouched the noise rules that can be turned against the very facilities meant to receive them. The remedy can therefore be a short national provision, available to any Member State willing to copy a rule that has now run for 15 years without difficulty: noise made by children at the facilities dedicated to their care and education is not an environmental nuisance and shall not be measured as such.

Portugal did not choose to have the test case, but it has one, and with it the chance to skip to an ending that other countries have already written. In P. D. James’s The Children of Men, the dystopia is a world in which there are no children left to hear. Ours is subtler, but real: the children still there, but asked — with measurements attached — to keep it down. A continent that worries about its birth rates and its ageing cannot coherently answer a two-century-old nursery with a sound meter. Once we begin to measure the volume of children’s joy, we run risks that can no longer be counted in decibels. We were all children once, on a distant day; and we were, or would have been, happier playing in freedom.