Is there too much noise for our children?

OIn the morning, after dropping the kids off at school, I chatted with a friend in the neighborhood. Earlier this year, she was worried about her eldest daughter. When she came home from high school in the evening, the girl was sullen, sad and sometimes crying. His parents tried to understand. Was it harassment? anxiety? Finally, the teenager confided in them that what he couldn’t stand, on a daily basis, was the noise. On the playground, in the cafeteria and even in class. They saw a doctor, who prescribed custom-made earplugs designed to filter out only high-pitched noises. Since then, her daughter takes them to school and is doing better. Apparently the earplugs don’t stop him from hearing the teacher or his friends and they are quite well accepted by those around him.

At home that same night, my youngest daughter, a first grader, told me that in the school cafeteria, the supervisors had collectively punished the students for making too much noise. In preschool, my son is regularly invited to play “the quiet game” in the cafeteria. And, recently, my oldest daughter, this year in fourth grade, told me that she had spent the day at preschool because her teacher was absent (my children go to a school that combines preschool and elementary education) . “I took a French test, but it was hard for me to concentrate,” he told me, “because the little ones were making a lot of noise.”

Are our children living in a noisy environment that is distressing, even unbearable for some of them? When I mentioned this to her in the office, a colleague told me that her daughter loved coming to her father’s workplace because it was “quiet and peaceful”. This is rather ironic, considering the countless complaints and uproar that occurred when the paper moved into a building that was completely diaphanous, meaning no partitions.

Up to 90 decibels in the cafeteria

And yet it’s true: our open space is much quieter than a school cafeteria, or even a classroom. Chiara Simeone is an acoustician at the research and consulting firm Acoustique et Conseil in Paris. Its task is, on the one hand, to ensure that the new buildings comply with the current rules – such as those that have been applied to educational centers since the decree of April 25, 2003, on acoustic limitation in educational centers – and, on the other, by soundproofing old buildings to improve comfort. The sound measurements were carried out in around 30 schools in the department of Yvelines, west of Paris. The results: In coffee shops, noise levels can reach 70 decibels, with peaks of up to 80 or 90 decibels. “In an open-plan office,” he said, by way of comparison, “the average is 55 or 60 decibels.”

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