We used to just ignore kids. In The Sims 4 as well. That gameplay loop was never our thing, especially the whole process of feeding them, sending them to school, and waiting for them to age up. The Parenthood pack is a piece of content that gave us a reason to actually pay attention. It still felt exhausting, but it did give a lot more variety, and it made us feel a deeper connection and care even more for our little pixel people.
What is a Sunday Sims Spotlight?
A weekly article designed to inform The Sims community through a detailed look at expansions and numerous add-ons for the cult simulation game. We inform you about what works best in terms of mechanics and all the things you might encounter for decorating your home.
Paint on the Floor
The pack gives toddlers, children, and teens five meters: Manners, Responsibility, Empathy, Conflict Resolution, and Emotional Control. The meters fill in depending on how you interact with the kids prior to or after a certain incident.
Toddlers and kids also get the “Make a Mess” interaction. Best of luck finding out in what shapes and forms that comes. Just know that it will completely tank your environment scores. Also, it was frustrating to try and juggle a few things at the same time. It’s close to impossible to, for example, send the parents off to build a skill by reading a book and leave the youngsters to their own devices. Instead, we spent a good chunk of time hunting the little bastards. The Parenting skill helps when it comes to scolding them, and when they do what they eventually will, you can use that skill to force them to rectify the situation, to a degree.
So, what we’re trying to say here is that, just like in real life, the kids will take up all your time and will become a sort of temporary bane of your existence. Before that happens, though, we had a lot of cool moments as well. Scolding is not the only thing you can do with those little rascals. Things become increasingly interesting when you level up the Parenting skill. We moved on to using timeouts. Eventually, we could ground them. Then came our favorite part: taking the phone away. Locking them in the house is also possible. No matter which option you choose, it’s super fun to observe their reactions, especially for the first few times.
In all that whirlwind of interactions, it was imperative to keep their five meters in mind. They do have a mind of their own and they can also decide to ignore our punishments, which, again, will make things take a hilarious turn. When they break the rules, their character values will undoubtedly tank, and we saw them stomping around the house with tense moodlets, complaining about us. As fun as this was at the beginning, after a while and after seeing everything several times, it all comes down to a really frustrating, but fun cycle of micromanagement.
The pack also allows for random phases to hit and surprise you out of the blue. For example, a notification might pop up saying our teen was in a “mean phase.” That made the teen start verbally abusing their siblings completely unprovoked. So, of course, we had to step in and force them to apologize. Doing so fixes their Conflict Resolution meter.
The “bear phase” was the most surprising and the most interesting one. During this phase, a kid could just randomly decide to live inside a mascot-style bear costume. Yes, before you ask, you could force them to take it off, but the result will be a massive sad moodlet. We regretted it the first time, so the next time it happened, we just ended up eating breakfast with a bear for three days. The adults can buy their own suit and wear it in solidarity to quickly boost their relationship with the kid, which we thought was a great touch.
Curfews and Volcanoes
School projects, like building a baking soda volcano, helped us spend some quality time with the family. Aside from that, we packed sack lunches, we set curfew times, and we caught them sneaking in. At one point, we used the phone to send the whole family to volunteer at a soup kitchen to build Empathy. It’s a great pack; it feels like Maxis listened to the community here, and it gave us some very cool The Sims 3: Generations vibes.
At the end of this burdensome journey, if you do manage to max out Responsibility, the kid gets the Responsible trait. As an adult, they can breeze through their career. On the flip side of the coin, there’s the Uncontrolled Emotions trait, where we got to watch a grown person literally throw temper tantrums. Our choices—how we dealt with the kids—truly mattered later on.
What will you find in The Sims 4: Nifty Knitting Stuff?
As we said in the beginning, we don’t like dealing with kids and we usually avoid this kind of gameplay like the plague. This was our first time actually delving a lot deeper into this loop, and we were completely blown away. It was insanely fun to mess with the youngsters and see how they react, especially what becomes of them in adulthood! Highly recommended!
ID Card
- Developer: Maxis
- Publisher: Electronic Arts
- Platforms: PC, Mac, PlayStation, Xbox
- Release Date: May 30, 2017
- Genre: Life Simulation
Thank you for reading, see you next Sunday!
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