Is there too much noise for our children? – Technologist

One morning, after dropping the kids off at school, I had a chat with a friend from the neighborhood. At the start of the year, she was worried about her eldest daughter. When she would come home from junior high school in the evenings, the girl was sullen, sad, and sometimes crying. Her parents tried to understand. Was it harassment? Anxiety? The teenager finally confided in them that what she couldn’t stand, on a daily basis, was the noise. In 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, their daughter has been wearing them at school and is doing better. Apparently, the earplugs don’t prevent her from hearing the teacher or her friends and are quite well-accepted by those around her.

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

Do our children live in a noisy environment that is distressing, even unbearable for some of them? When I mentioned this at the office, a colleague told me that his daughter loved coming to her father’s workplace because it was “calm and quiet.” This is rather ironic, given the countless complaints made and fuss caused when the newspaper moved into a fully open-plan building, in other words, without any partitions.

Up to 90 decibels in the cafeteria

And yet, it is 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. Her work consists, on the one hand, of ensuring that new buildings comply with current standards – such as those that have applied to schools since the decree of April 25, 2003, regarding noise limitation in educational institutions – and, on the other, in soundproofing older buildings to improve comfort. Sound measurements were carried out in around 30 schools in the Yvelines department west of Paris. The results: In cafeterias, noise levels can be as high as 70 decibels, with peaks of up to 80 or 90 decibels. “In an open-plan office,” she said, by way of comparison, “the average is 55 or 60 decibels.”

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