What to Say When Your Neighbor’s Dog Won’t Stop Barking

Cheryl Groskopf, a marriage and family therapist in Los Angeles, once lived next door to a very loud little dog. It barked for hours at a time, including as she worked from home and tried to sleep at night. She initially chalked up the barking to puppyhood, but it kept getting worse. “The tiniest little jingle of the keys would set it off,” she says. Eventually, she stopped barbecuing in her backyard—her favorite pastime—because her presence there triggered the dog. But then she realized the absurdity of the situation. “Wait, no,” she recalls thinking. “I should be outside.” She finally texted her neighbor to ask if everything was OK. Her neighbor’s response: “Oh my God, I didn’t know it was this bad.”By then, Groskopf had developed a less charitable explanation. “She doesn’t care about her dog,” she recalls thinking. “She doesn’t care about her neighbors.” Having a therapist’s tools hadn’t made her immune to resentment—and it didn’t make the prospect of speaking up any less awkward. “You want to maintain a relationship with someone you have to see regularly,” she says.So how do you ask for quiet without making every subsequent encounter uncomfortable? We asked experts what to say—...