We already have issues with next door because the mum cannot manage the 7yo boy’s behaviour at all (I’d argue she doesn’t necessarily make much effort to from what we see and hear through the very thin walls to be fair though). He completely runs rings round her, the banging (often on the party wall) and screaming/swearing/shouting from him to the mum is awful, when the step-dad (who lives there) is off work it’s even worse somehow, and since they had another baby last October he’s been loads worse and you hear him start off and then the baby is screaming, and you either hear absolutely nothing from the adults or they start screaming too. She’s admitted before they often just try to ignore him because he can become physically violent towards her but listening to him is awful, it’s like he’s an abusive husband the way he goes on screaming and swearing at her. We do talk to them about it and she does get his grandparents to have him some of the time on weekends to try and give us all some respite from it which we’re grateful for, so we’ve been trying to just tolerate it as best we can.
Then this afternoon I was pegging out washing, I heard them come into the garden and the mum told the boy not to spray the hosepipe in the direction of the shared fence because ‘the neighbours are putting washing on the line’. While all this is going on here chickens were out of the (very smelly) enclosure roaming around and it just seemed like the usual general chaos going on there. I just carried on pegging the washing.
Our driveways are at the back of our back gardens so I don’t know if that’s where she went but the next minute, I got absolutely soaked and he was cackling spraying the hosepipe over the fence which sprayed all the washing line full of clothes I’d just took out of a spin to peg out.
I shouted over and said ‘[boy’s name] please can you stop that’, to which he continued and carried on laughing. She clearly heard me but never said anything to me and again told him to only spray it the other way and on the ‘rain’ setting ‘not the jet’. Seconds later he sprayed me and the washing again laughing his little head off. It was definitely on some sort of jet setting the way it was coming over.
I fully appreciate that for him this must have been the height of hilarity, but by this point all my hair was wet, my top was wet, and I was utterly cheesed off. I ended up shouting to the mother by name and said ‘he’s just sprayed me and the washing twice you know’. She again didn’t respond directly to me at all and just told him she wouldn’t let him use the hose again if he was going to do that.
It then went quiet for a few minutes and she then randomly started having a go at him that she hadn’t known he was in the garden and thought he had gone into the house and was in his bedroom, she complained that she was now going to have to go and do the whole garden with just the watering can because he couldn’t behave with the hosepipe - I can only assume she said that thinking it would ameliorate the situation with me, but I’d heard them from the moment they came into the garden so I knew that she knew full well he was in the garden. At no point did she directly respond to me or even say sorry.
AIBU to be pretty fuming about this? I’m so ground down with this child’s behaviour and the mother’s lackadaisical approach to parenting, but don’t know if I’m just over reacting or they actually really are just nightmare neighbours and I’m justified in being really upset and annoyed about today.