Children are loud. Neighbors get annoyed. What can a family do?

Sharing walls or floors in apartment buildings means sharing noise, but it doesn't have to lead to conflict

Six years ago, in the haze of new motherhood, Adrianne Wright found herself facing an unexpected problem: a disgruntled neighbor.

Her daughter had been born nine weeks premature. There was a lot going on, understandably, from getting used to this new chapter to dealing with some of the health complications that she was experiencing, with [...] noisy machines at home to monitor breathing." The last thing Wright, the founder of the communications agency Think Rosie, wanted was to receive noise complaints from the neighbor living below her brownstone apartment in New York City's Park Slope neighborhood.