How can you raise five/six children? «12...Next Go

FlyingPotato659

I been playing TS3 very recently. So far my first gen was a single mother in medical career raising a daughter of Xander Clavell who is now a young adult.

Now I'm moving onto 2nd gen with Xander's daughter who is currently dating a son of the Langerak couple who was born around the same time as her.

I'm thinking of having these pair to get married and have children with a newly built house behind a white picket fence.

My pregnancy settings with mods are that gender is 50/50. Triplets = 3% chance. Twins = 7% chance fyi so I can't influence multiples or gender . It's random.

The main question is how do you manage raising so many children? Without cheats of course.

jaletu2005

You know I've always struggled with this myself. I find it useful to create another adultsim to be an extra set of hands for when they are small. They are magically much easier by the time they're children.

I just add the extra sim to the family and become friends with them. Also I make them very neat and a natural cook so you get lots of help around the house. You might want to give them the nurture trait as well. They are the nanny!

Nikkei_Simmer

Last I heard was: 1) a lot of patience
2) a lot of simoleons.

Sleepstar

I remembered in one Save the active household had five kids, but luckily, by the time the Triplets were born the older siblings assisted their parents (It also helped the husband was at the top of his Career as an astronaut by then, so he had some free time).

rubyskywalker

I'm doing the LTW to raise five kids from baby to teen on one of my saves. I took a break to rebuild the town however and plan to continue it after.

So far the family is the parents, a fairy, Derek, and human, Rosalie; plus Rosalie's sister Juliette, then the kids: The family heir, Eduardo, who is human (currently a toddler, who's completely trained in walk, talk and potty); the twins, Lacey, who is a fairy, and Willow, who is human (toddlers, neither are trained in their skills yet as far as I know); and the newborn who's name I already forgot, who is human. I still need one more for the LTW and it's already a handful and many days of my sims having sleepness nights. Right now my sims have the perfect jobs for this though: singer, artist and private-I. Derek just recently switched from the theater music career to the Showtime Singer career. (My fault for that: I demolished the theater to rebuild Mirabello Plaza. It will return in a new location soon.)

So yes, it is possible. I recommend the sims have jobs that don't require them constantly being on the job in rabbitholes (example: Singer, Magician, Acrobat, Self-employed jobs like Artist or Author; Private Investigator, Ghost Hunter, Stylist, Architect, maybe Firefighter or Medical but medical results in too many late night emergency calls on already sleepless nights. Might be best to switch to that if the kids are older and don't require constant care). And like others said, add a sibling or a nanny sim to help out. Even better, save up simoleons to get bonehilda if your sims aren't cowards. Otherwise, if you don't have Supernatural do the maid service and cancel it later on. LOL
Also make sure your house has space so your sims won't get stuck waiting for others to move.
And a big nursery. Or two. Close to the parents' room of course.

CravenLestat

I only can handle one child at a time and not feel stressed,the most is two and I envy you and any other simmer than can handle more than 3 kids even some with 5 or 6.

And the daycare career No Way!!! I can't do it.

@Finbar659 From personal experience the premium objects from the Sims 3 store are lifesavers.The baby swing is like sending your kids off to happy camp except in your living room.Plus Jaletu2005 has the right idea several simmers have mentioned focusing down and aging one child quicker than the rest because that teen becomes a third set of hands.Also recommend the playpen from the store

Also there is the Supernanny LTR but the Bot you can make with ITF using the chips are top notch give them Robonanny chip and have a third parent who is better than humans,they teach them to use potty,talk,walk everything.

Never underestimate the Plumbots as childcare they are great

SimplyJen

Move the grandparents back in to help out. Another option is to purchase a SimBot (My Best Friend) lifetime reward or purchase a Plumbot w/ RoboNanny trait chip installed.

I used to hate SimBots after Into the Future gave us Plumbots which are better in every way but SimBots can still be handy around the house.

CravenLestat

@SimplyJen Scroll up *high fives* we think alike

charmed4life4

I tend to have one parent with a rabbit hole job and the other working from home in some capacity. I place a lot of focus on the babies and toddlers and basically leave the children and teens to do their thing (or boarding school is always an option ) . I also place the babies and toddlers in one nursery and try to get them on the same schedule of sorts and will "assembly line" their care to fill their needs. I also was able to get the items from the store forever ago that help toddlers learn to talk and walk like the play pen and walker. If things get really bad I also have the baby swing and will put it on the "slow" setting if the parent's needs get really low. The babies and toddlers usually go straight down for a nap buying some time for the parents.

puzzlezaddict

My sims never have trouble raising a bunch of kids, even all in a row. I don't use the store objects either, and often enough, one parent does almost all the work. It does help a lot if that parent is self-employed though. I let the other one tend to their day job and pitch in when available, or sometimes not at all, depending on the story line in my head.

The thing that makes this easiest for me is teaching the kids their skills as efficiently as possible. Toddlers learn skills from sims with the Family Oriented trait much more quickly than normal. And like other sims, toddlers learn faster when their mood is high. So I try to max out mood and have the FO sim do most or all of the skill teaching. For the mood:

• Pureed high quality food gives the same 8 hour moodlet as it would for other sims. Put the kid in the high chair and have a blender on the lot, and you can make them almost anything. I only use this if I'm desperate.
• Having a blast (+40)
• Stereo with the Improve Speakers upgrade, playing their favorite station (+40 for the most expensive stereo)
• Fresh or Very Fresh clothing, from changing clothes (+15 or +25)
• Squeaky clean, from changing their diaper, even if they've already learned to potty (+10)
• Toddlers with the Lives the Outdoors trait will get a moodlet from being outside (+20)
• Having slept with a teddy bear (in inventory works) (+20)
• Playing with the imaginary friend, even for a moment (+20)

It's therefore easy to max out a toddler's mood, and combining that with a FO sim, a toddler can learn to walk or talk in about 2:15, and to potty in 1.5 tries. I don't do all of the above, just enough of what's convenient to get close to the max.

Toddlers can also read books on their own, and they build relationships with each other or with children when playing with the dollhouse, so it's easy for them to start out friends with their older siblings too.

Turjan

Hmm, reminds me of the first family I raised in this game. It had 4 toddlers, but there were three adults in the house, the parents plus the original owner who didn't get kicked out. They also had a butler as soon as they could afford one. The butler passed out on the floor from exhaustion all the time, and I guess having three of four cribs in the master bedroom didn't help with sleep, either . They all grew up fine, though, and this on an epic timescale.

McTosh

with much stress and sorrow

DottyKC

My first sim family ever had 6 kids toddler age or younger all in a row (never again), but I got through it because the mom was a politician most of the way through her career, so she just kept getting pregnant and never going back to work before the next kid, and the dad was good old Conor Frio, so he was perfectly happy to stay home most of the time to write and care for the kiddos while the mother went to fundraising parties solo. I always had my hand hovering over the pause key to line up actions when things got too crazy, and I avoided ever using babysitters-- they just mess up the rhythm too much and let the kids' happiness get too low. Having all the cribs lined up in one room helps immensely! Moral of the story: wait until the first kid/set of twins is just about out of toddler age to have another one... and maybe nudge that baby age slider down a few notches to make it all less painful =)

DottyKC

Oh, and don't bother with high chairs-- cordless are perfectly happy with a bottle on the floor

ApparentlyAwesome

With routine and a maid.

I don't try to set a routine but after a while I get into a groove with whatever household I'm playing and when I switch I have to learn what works for them all over again. Having a maid and/or a babysitter helps sometimes too since they take some of the load off but sometimes you get the lazy or klepto ones. Sometimes I just get Bonehilda.

I forgot I had a maid because she wasn't doing anything but making beds so I bought the coffin and summoned Bonehilda. The maid came to work that day talking about she not going to be worked to the bone or something like that and quit.

IreneSwift

I play on low free will, so it's not always easy. If things get too stressful, I send the kids to boarding school. But I did have one family once that had a total of 13 children, because I decided that every time both of them wished to have another child, I'd let them. There were never more than 9 sims in the household at once, with NRaas Story Progression making that possible, as I moved them out as soon as they aged up to young adult. My strategy was to assign each child one skill that they would continue with for hours at a time, until I stopped them or they finished something, like painting or playing a musical instrument. I also had each of them do fun activities they would stay with, like playing on the playground or playing chess or sim gnubb. So I'd get most of them busy with those activities and then focus on having just one of them doing things that needed more input from me. It worked well. I never got stressed from playing them. However, I found it impossible to get attached to them as much as I usually do to my sims' offspring, because I wasn't spending much time with any of them.

There was one exception though. When the first one aged up to teen, she became responsible for the babies and toddlers in the night, and whenever during the day the mother was busy in her garden or cooking. When she aged up to young adult, the next most recently aged up teen took over those duties. As it turned out, that second teen, who was a twin, was my favorite, so I didn't move her out when she aged up. Instead, she stayed at home until first her father, then her mother, died. Then she moved to another town with the three remaining minor children.

giullia

I love families with many children, but they always end up driving me nuts. And it's kind of boring, because I take months to raise all those kids, and it takes too long to change generations. Still, it's a rewarding experience, and it's awesome when my sims have more than twenty granchildren.

Vivi_WillowTree

By everything available available for the toddlers and kids. It keeps them busy while the parents focus on the younger children and their skills. Also inviting family members to "help" works wonders. It gets a bit quirky, i love it.

airotciv54

Large families can get out of control very quickly. Pause is your friend. Then take control, give everyone in the family something to do. Doesn't matter what it is. Now you have control again.

HillyBeth

Finbar659 wrote: »

I been playing TS3 very recently. So far my first gen was a single mother in medical career raising a daughter of Xander Clavell who is now a young adult.

Now I'm moving onto 2nd gen with Xander's daughter who is currently dating a son of the Langerak couple who was born around the same time as her.

I'm thinking of having these pair to get married and have children with a newly built house behind a white picket fence.

My pregnancy settings with mods are that gender is 50/50. Triplets = 3% chance. Twins = 7% chance fyi so I can't influence multiples or gender . It's random.

The main question is how do you manage raising so many children? Without cheats of course.

Two words:
Boarding School

ciane

I use the birthday cake to grow up babies right away. I try to have them potty trained before hiring a baby sitter. With a family-oriented sim, it only takes a day.

liizzys1302

I have the age span on 2 days for babies as you just can't do anything with them so that shortens the time you need to care for them a little bit. I also have toddler on 5 days so the mum can spend her maternity leave teaching the toddler their skills so by the time they go back to work they don't have to rush around after work teaching skills. I also use the walker from the sims 3 store so toddlers can teach themselves how to walk. I also recommend waiting until a toddler ages up into a child or has at least learned all of their skills and is close to ageing up before trying for another baby (or try for a baby 2-3 days before they age up so that their a child when the new baby(s) arrive) this just takes the pressure off a little as kids don't really need taking care of except for a few social interactions to prevent them being taken away.

MamaSimTee

A lot of patience. The maid is a must, especially if there are a lot of littles in the house. I"m also not afraid of "cheating" motives with the parents so they can get tasks done and make sure the social worker doesn't come to take the kids away. Books and toys are helpful as well.

Karritz

I forgot about how easy/difficult it is to raise just 5 or 6 children. My games use mods to make the number in a household unlimited.

But - after reading what others have said above I remember how much assistance a live in nanny used to be. I just make a nanny sim and keep them in my inventory for whenever she/he is needed to assist. It is now not unusual for me to need more than one nanny at a time as I'm in the habit of having many babies and toddlers - up to around 15 at a time. But that's another story about my boarding school idea. I collect toddlers and children from around town and teach them skills all at once and the result is my towns are much more lively and full of sims who know each other well and they drop into their old boarding school after they've returned to their parents and do their homework with the old friends.

I also give my sims high autonomy, that way I'm not constantly trying to remember to tell them to eat or relieve their bladders.

Steel bladder LTW is useful.

I have lots of bathrooms just in case there is a rush to get clean before having to go to school.

I try to keep the fridge well stocked with meals any child can grab at any time.

I refuse to have a high chair on the lot as that causes mayhem once there is more than 1 toddler.

I occasionally use play pens and walkers, but I move them to the family inventory when they get too annoying with parents constantly moving toddlers to a playpen when the toddler needs to learn skills that do not require a playpen or walker.

I regularly click through all of the sims portraits in order to check the needs of each one and deal with any that need dealing with. After school I check their homework has been done. Usually they will do it autonomously, but occasionally one starts to avoid doing it and their grades can drop really fast and they are hard to get back up again. I try to keep their school grades on A Grade.

I make sure toddlers are fed and clean before the parents or nannies are too tired to deal with them. That way the toddlers usually sleep through the night. Once they get into a habit of screaming endlessly it is extremely difficult to stop it. Some toddlers are just naturally constant screamers and others can be quite placid regardless of how much care is taken of them.

Toddlers and babies are easier once there are children and teens in the house except with more sims capable of taking care of them it can become a lineup to move the baby or toddler from whatever activity it's doing to some other activity and shuffling them needlessly around cribs is one thing that sims can get into the habit of doing. The baby bouncer/blanket thing is annoying as the sims are obsessed with putting baby into it and then taking it out again.

Another thing I routinely do is cycle through all of my sims to check if they have enough Lifetime Happiness points to buy a reward that I think might be useful for them to have.

Then I sit back and watch the mayhem. Often I record the mayhem and use it to make YouTube videos.

Main thing is to have fun.

Happy Simming

izecson

I can't even manage raising one children let alone multiple of them, they even still crying when their motives are green uggh

Sharonia

I love big families in the sims games. The busier they keep me the better. My main sim in my family has the life time wish to raise five children to teen and I'm planning on fulling that wish.