Over here the tween magazine for parents is for "Parents of tweens 9-12" It's considered the age, not how mature or immature the tween is. A lot of the 'mature' tween things going on I think is do with the culture you come from and what the kids are exposed to via the media and friends, and area they live in as well as the growing at their own rate. My daughter is a very average 10 year old for around here and pretty much on average 'growth wise'



Can I ask if you're American? Ever since coming online 12 years ago I've noticed how 'mature' American children are in this regard. At 10 through 12 I didn't give it a thought. Dating was something teenagers did if their parents allowed it, and many did not until 15 or so. Most kids of this age here think the other has 'germs'



They have to because they are encompassing the whole teenage agerange which is 13-18/19
But if they are 17 on becoming teen why would they then stay teens for 15 days?

labellavienna, I agree and I am not Asian, I'm Australian. I think we are less concerned about pleasing parents and grades, but most kids (from 'good' families) do not date until somewhere into their teen years.



Yes that^ I want it for both adults and elders.

I agree with this so much. I love salt-and-pepper hair, and honestly wish there were more people (or even just one; I don't think I've ever actually seen it before D: ) who included them as a color option for adults. I would make them myself if I were any good at hair recolors :P



I don't think 'mature' is really the right word for it. Most kids over here in the States are just in such a big hurry to grow up, and they see relationships and dating as being the epitome of adulthood. Which isn't all that unusual, but these days a lot of parents just don't pay much attention anymore, so a lot of children really don't have anyone around to tell them that it's okay to just be a kid and enjoy it.

A lot of it does depend on where you're at, though. In the area I lived in until I was 12, the attitude that the opposite sex had 'cooties' was very prevalent among my peers. Then I moved several states over and suddenly everyone was talking about dating and sex. It was very disconcerting :/

ETA: Tweens and pre-teens, at least in my area, refers to people age 12 to 15. That's interesting; I always figured it was a universal thing. It didn't occur to me that the term might differ from place to place. You learn something new everyday!

Although having more different life stages can be fun, it can still be boring, if you consider the amount of time it will take to finish one generation. EA designed it that way so that things would run smooth but not too fast neither too slow, i.e. it is somewhat the 'ultimate balance'.

I also had no idea a tween could refer to anyone over 13 either. Tween here means an older child before teenagerhood. Well you become a teenager as soon as you turn 13.

That is why I put apostrophes around the word mature. I didn't mean mature as in they really are mature, but rather they think wearing certain clothing and having boyfriends/girlfriends is mature. It's a sad state of affairs when a child feels they can't act like a kid. I've seen comments where tweens have said they still play Barbies-only they pretend not to around their friends. My husband told me today that someone he knows thought Littlest Pet shop was for little kids and was surprised my daughter was playing with them. I guess that is why youtube is full of tweens and teens making movies with them then...

Anyone over 13 is technically a teenager here as well -- like it's what you put down on paperwork and for doctor's visits and stuff -- but it's generally accepted in my area that anyone under 16 is still really too young to be associated with a lot of the stuff that teenagers are known for, so they get stuck with the pre-teen label. I really only hear tween associated with 12 year olds, specifically, though. Anything younger is just a 'kid', and anything older is 'pre-teen' or 'teen'.

The Littlest Pet Shop thing doesn't actually surprise me, actually. Toys like that are marketed for young girls here -- under 8, usually. In fact, most toys tend to be aimed at younger kids right around that age or younger. I don't really see a lot of things geared towards the 9-13 range, except for some video games maybe. (But to be fair, I don't pay attention much anymore...)

And there's also a lot of peer pressure in that regards; like I said, a lot of kids are trying to be grown ups, so they tend to treat anyone actually acting their age as 'immature' or a 'baby'. I got made fun of when I was 9 for playing with a Barbie, which is incidentally around the time I lost interest in them and started avoiding a lot of my old toys. Guess it left a bad taste in my mouth and kind of ruined the fun.

Just for the record everyone - I was not trying to sound like a pervert and in no way do I think it is perverted to request a real life thing like a pre-teen age group. However, since from reading some answers I guess pre-teen (10-12) was not the right word to use. Perhaps young teen or early teen - I was referring to girls around 13-15.

I would never think of anyone of 13-15 as being anything other than a teenager. Maybe this also comes from us not having middle schools. We have primary and high school. For the most part you are 5-12 at primary school and 13 to 17 at high school.

They do the marketing thing here too although it's mostly just 'over 4' rather than 'under 8' Her friend who is 10 and her sister 8 are just as big into the LP's as is her other friend who is not only 10, but a boy. The clothing marketing though is horrible. Boys stuff looks like trash and most cute pretty girls clothing stops at size 7 which drives my daughter wild. I'm quite sure if I let her she'd be out with a placard protesting that just because you are over seven does not mean you want to dress like a teenager or wear grey and black. The strange thing is I buy quite a bit of her pretty cute clothes from Gymboree which is an American brand. Given the culture that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

ella_in_wonderland, that puts a whole other spin on the topic. I guess it was just one of those cultural misunderstandings. I've had some very interesting and enlightening conversations on the internet learning about jumpers, thongs and ah what Americans call a bum bag. >cough<

Because the teen stage tends to be popular with the players. Teens are teens longer than they're children and half as long as they're adults, which doesn't make any sense if Sims are aging similarly to people.

Maxis could have restricted some things to older teens, sort of like that hack that only lets teens near the end of that life stage go to college. I don't think we're meant to think of Sim time like real time.

This is basically a very nice, concise description of American culture all on its own

But in all seriousness, one of the nifty things about the States is that there's so much that caters to individual taste. There are lots of younger kids who like to dress like they're in they're late teens, but there's also plenty who like cute stuff, and there's a ton of things out there to suit both. (There's also lots of older ones who like cute things; you can find plenty of classic 'cute' clothes for adult women in American shops.)

But this is getting really off-topic, so I digress >_>

@ella: That's kind of what I figured you meant. I still kind of think it might've dragged things out a little more, but an age corresponding to middle schoolers might have been kind of neat to have. Especially if they'd gotten new/unique interactions, as opposed to just rehashed teen ones that they would have gotten anyway...

Ugh - I'd hate a pre-teen stage. I think the younger ages are out of proportion and too long anyway. I'd guess this is because it's mostly younger people who play the game. The other objection I have to it is that it's an advertising term - invented by people who want to sell you stuff (just as teen is, as a matter of fact). So no.

Middle-age, OTOH, I'd be happy with. I have some salt and pepper hairs but you're right Darby, there are not too many around.

joandsarah-
I'm American, and in general my friends (who tended to be well-behaved) didn't date until we were a ways into our teens. Heh- I remember being at a friend's sleepover when I was about 10 and one of the other girls told us what French kissing was. I thought it sounded so gross! But I remember in sixth grade (ages 11-12), there wasn't a lot of choice as to where to sit in the cafeteria, and so my best friend and I had to sit right near these gross girls who told sleazy stories.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that not all American kids grow up too fast.

(Oh- and I loved my Littlest Pet Shop! I still have mine stored away somewhere.)

victory- That stinks! I'm sorry you got made fun of. Every school has their jerks, I guess.

Okay, middle-aged hair... Here are base game recolors of the OFB perm with some gray hair in it. It's unbinned, by the way.

Officially, Mermaid Cove is closed, but when you visit it via the Wayback Machine, at least some of the downloads are still available! Here is her download page with links to AF and AM hair with gray and/or white streaks. Again, unbinned. Hope that helps, even if the quality isn't the best (they're all old-ish hairs, from circa 2006).

ETA: fixed link- thanks, victory!

I sometimes wish there were more age groups as well. In my "perfect game" I'd love to have:
baby -> toddler -> kindergarten /pre-school kid (corresponds to 3-6 years olds, would love to have an option of "Send/Drive to Kindergarten" for them in addition to existing "Hire a Nanny") -> elementary school kids (7-11) -> middle school kids/high school kids (12-18yo, either as one Age group or separate one, but preferably separate) -> Young Adults (19-25yo, they can either go to College, or not) -> Adults (26-55yo, ideally with Middle Age group starting at 40-45) -> Mature Age group (or how to say it in English more correctly? Pre-Seniors? 56-65yo) -> Seniors (66-75) -> Elders (above 75).

In addition to what was said above about Kids going straight to Teens, also with Adults turning into Elders at 55 days (=years in Sim world), makes it not only unrealistic, but makes me wonder if game is build based on Soviet Union/current Russia system, the only country I know of where people can retire at age of 55 and start receiving pension. Where I live, and in most countries, people have to work for 10 more years or so, before they can be called Elders and think of retirement. Also, many people at 55-65 are still very energetic and don't resemble Elders imposed by game developers.

I also find the Adult life span of 29 days (years) too short. Quite often it takes that long for my Sims to earn enough for traveling, house refurnishing, to rise their offspring to Teens (and gain more independence from parental obligations, since Teens are capable of taking care of themselves, unlike kids, in Simworld..), to reach respectable job positions (often it means to reach LTW), to learn enough witch spells to bring havoc at community lots (XDDD).. Anyway, just when my Adult Sims reached the point where they can finally start enjoying life and be able to woohoo anytime they want instead of skilling, bam! they get grey hair, bent backs and rasp voices I'd love for them to have 10 more days till the next age stage.

Now, see, here's what I don't get.

You don't play this game unless know how to interpret random events into story and character and project human emotions and thought processes onto handfuls of code and colored light. Most of us on this board wound up here because we're comfortable with tweaking "the rules" to suit ourselves, whether through the creation of custom content, the hacking of code, or the development of personal playstyle. So why would you need hard-coded transitional life-stages?

Gradual aging is like the open world - the programming realities make it impractical without sucking most of the fun out of the game (for the value of fun I want from the game). If nothing else, it would remove a lot of the interpretive control the player has; and it's precisely this interpretive control that the existing lifestages maximize.

Practical example: I introduced the Thyme family because I had a surfeit of female-oriented teens. I could have alleviated this some by not deciding to make Naomi Gavigan a lesbian; but as soon as I realized she was a clone of her big brother Ezekial, I'd been seized with the idea that she was like him all the way down, same gender orientation and all, and I'd always played her that way. So I had a bunch of teens wandering around wistfully trying to hit on Sparrow Hawkins and being let down gently. It wasn't as bad as the generation of lesbians, but I had five or six boys and Naomi who had nobody to date and for some reason couldn't meet suitable townies to save their lives. So I made Hi Thyme and his four daughters, doing my best to randomize their appearance and chemistry within limited parameters to achieve a good balance between providing the range of spares with good chemistry without deterministic matchmaking, plopped them down in the neighborhood, and watched them meet boys. (I'm afraid I did make Justine a lesbian out of the box. Player favoritism, plus it simplified things if I didn't make them tell me what gender orientation they wanted.) It worked spectacularly, with Spring and Summer practically knocking each other down to get Tommy Ottomas's attention, Rosemary bringing John Amos Aerius home from school on her second day, everybody trying out Emilio Casa and finding him wanting, and triple boltage out the wazoo. I have to call this one of my more successful experiments, even with (or even because of) Spring's untimely accidental death. During the course of play I decided the birth order of the girls based on their relationships with the Lonely Boys and each other, and I sent them off to college (or would have, in Spring's case - she died the morning of the day she was supposed to leave) in synch with the boys they chose, so that Summer and Justine were teens for a much shorter time than Rosemary, who got her full teen stage.

I couldn't have done any of that with teens formally divided into two stages. I'd have had to decide when I built them who was more likely to orient toward the older Lonely Boys and the younger ones, and I would have had to either design them more deterministically or create more than four Thyme girls. The long lifestage and the capacity to send teens to college at any point gave me exactly the flexibility I needed.

It's true that a split lifestage with romantic interactions limited would mean I wouldn't get situations like the one with Frank Munny and Tina Traveller, in which Tina's autonomous behavior has caused Frank to fall for her even though he's enough days older that it squicks me, but you know what? Teens behave inappropriately once in awhile, and that creates a story conflict I can use. So it's all good. The split lifestage would also mean that the programmers would have had to decide for their players which romantic interactions were and were not allowed, and that would mean inevitably getting it wrong for a good chunk of the potential audience. I would feel much, much squickier about a program-imposed interaction which I didn't think should cross the middle/high school barrier than I do about Tina's pursuit of Frank and his eventual surrender.

Don't want your younger teens to drive? Make them walk or call a cab. Don't want your adults to go from looking 25 to looking 75? Go on a CC hunt and give them mid-life makeovers. Can't find the CC you want? Make your own, or make do. Even with Maxis content you can change hairlines, swap out young-looking pony-tails for mature chignons or perms, change makeup and clothing habits, add glasses and change their style, swap out the sports car for a mini-van, mini-skirts for mom-jeans, tank tops for ties.

The software is an enabler. The key to this game is the wetware between your ears.

I appreciate the thought, but that link doesn't work

ETA: Apparently I can't spell today -_-

I agree that teenhood is far too long. But I tend to think -- although I may be giving them too much credit -- that the devs did this deliberately so that players could in fact simulate a "young teen" and an "older teen" stretch of 7 days each. That they didn't create a "young teen" body shape and an "older teen" body shape might have something to do with the fact that boys and girls mature differently? Generally, girls physically (and often emotionally/psychologically) mature more quickly than boys do and also have more obvious physical evidence of having done so. Girls tend to (at least) start to develop breasts and hips and start their periods around 13ish, so even though they may still be emotionally young, their bodies are, indeed, ready to go, so to speak. Some girls start even earlier. I, like a previous poster, had to start wearing a B-cup bra and had to start wearing "junior" size clothing (stuff meant for teens) because I had fully-developed hips, all when I was around 9. I had my first period a month or two before my 10th birthday. All of it was mortifyingly embarassing for me at the time, but...Hey, it happens. (And I was a skinny little thing as a kid, so my "development" had nothing to do with being fat.) Boys, on the other hand, while they'll often acquire the ability to ejaculate fairly young -- usually, again, around 13ish or so -- they don't show much outward evidence of physical/sexual maturation until later, when they can grow facial hair and their bodies become more maturely muscular. And while I have heard of 15/16-year-old guys who can grow beards and need to shave daily if they want to be clean-shaven and my own son started shaving every few days when he was about 15 or so, for many guys, that doesn't happen until they're in their late teens/eariy 20s. Or even later. Heck, one of my good friends, who's in his 40s like me, STILL can't grow a beard, no matter how hard he tries, nor does he have much in the way of body hair...although that might have more to do with the fact that he's mostly Navajo with a dash of Mexican thrown in, both ethnicities not known for surpluses of body hair. (He has gorgeous long black hair on his head, though, which I love to play with. )

But anyway, I tend to think the logistics of realistically portraying, physically, a "tween" stage might have been difficult. Because to realistically portray it, you'd need different body shapes for the genders and, to be really realistic, perhaps different behaviors as well, to realistically the simulate the differential rates of emotional/psychological development that the genders tend to display as well. I don't think I'd want a tween stage unless it WAS significantly different than both the child and teen stage. AND I'd want the "real" teen stage to be shorter, if there was a tween stage.

All that said, I have Inteen in my game, so that when the 2nd week of teenhood hits, my pixels have, in my mind, achieved growed-up-ness. Basically, they've turned 18, and Inteen gives them all the "adult" stuff, meaning adult-track jobs, not attending school anymore, the ability to move out, all the romantic interactions including the possibility of pregnancy, etc. So for me, the first week of teenhood is all the teenhood they get and, at least in my head, that's the stretch when they're young teens, still dependent on parents and such but also fairly independent. Like, they can cook for themselves. (My daughter became the chief cook in our household when she was 12ish because she truly enjoys cooking/baking...and does it better than either I or my housemate does it. She just turned 15 a couple of weeks ago.) And they can have a teen-track part time job because I myself got my first job, working at the local library shelving books for a couple of hours a day when I was 13. But I don't, for instance, let them drive, although the game allows them to do so. I will let them go out on dates once they're a few days into teenhood -- which in my mind would be when they're 14ish -- but I won't let them do any more than kiss chastely until they're about a day shy of the second teen week. So, basically, I treat them like tweens at first and then give them more freedoms as they progress toward the second week of teenhood, at which point they are a "Young Adult" in my mind, even if they don't go to college, and have all adult "benefits."

Now, the fact that a young teen immediately looks like an older teen is a little bothersome to me, but I also do like a previous poster does, dressing the younger ones differently and giving them "younger" hairstyles and accessories and not letting the girls wear makeup until they're getting close to the second teen week. Once they hit the second week, both genders get more grown-up clothing and hairstyles, the girls get makeup and more grown-up jewelry if they're the jewelry-wearing type, and the boys get body hair and some sparse stubble (because often that's all teens can grow, the poor dears) and maybe some piercings to further differentiate them from their younger counterparts, if they're the piercing type.

On the other hand, I DON'T make my adults look progressively older. I don't know why, but the insta-aging at the adult/elder transition has never particularly bothered me. In fact, I suppose that the "aging" I do with teens I do mostly to make the teen stage more interesting to me, not because I'm particularly trying to be "realistic." Because otherwise I think it's very much too long and I just want them to grow the hell up already.

Oops, sorry! It should work now. Thanks for telling me!

When I think of having more life stages, what's appealing is that there could be all sorts of new interactions. I'd love my toddlers to grow into preschoolers who got taught to tie their shoes and write their name. There could be more rites of passages and interactions for the other stages too.

Oh, thank you, macaroodle! I've always regretted that Hairfish's site went away before I got into the Sims - she was my favorite creator for Sims1 for certain kinds of content.

One thing I would love to see are more retextured hair of styles like these. D. J Mur's version is very nice of the OFB perm, but perhaps a more modern version, a litle smoother ...

But if I go on, I fear I'll be directed into the WCIF section. And I'm not that great with Sim PE to try it myself.

If I recall, Mermaid Cove also had bags for under the eyes. I see there are bags here, too, for adult female:

http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=241762

And some interesting middle-aged features here ...

http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=246697

There are some slight salt- and pepper- hairstyles for men on MTS as well. Not overdone (some really go over the top) ... subtle and smooth:

http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=472583

There are several links in the Overview.

I find some "middle-aged" features a little TOO exaggerated ... particularly those Maxis wrinkles. (C'mon ... grant me a BIT of fantasy, please!) . But the links above don't seem too bad.

I wouldn't have minded seeing an extra stage or two myself, by the way, particularly middle-aged, perhaps ages 4 - 5 and a brief pre-teen stage. Perhaps in Sims 4 ... 5 ... 25.

I did try to make a grey/brown hair recolor. I uploaded it
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/89037828/grey2.package
if someone wants to test it.( It looks blurry in my game but perhaps that is because I don't have a graphics card.)

The stage I'd like is the middle-aged stage. Seems like sims hit retirement age a little early, on the other hand, elderhood cuts in at about the right point for menopause.
Middle-aged, I'd like to come with the option to change aspiration and turn-offs, as at mid-uni. Pregnancy chances would end altogether at about fifty, just as it does now, and the real age up to elder at sixty-five. So, I'd take ten days from the elder stage and ten from the adult stage. The elder stage would then vary from one day to whatever it currently does minus ten. At midlife, a sim could retire but they'd only get part, maybe 50%, of the retirement they'd get by waiting til elder.

She was a quality recolourer though I didn't always like her choices. However, I still have a lot of her stuff if you want something in particular. I have those middle aged hairs, for example.

fruitsymphony I'll try your hair. I have every salt and pepper type hair I've come across in the last however many years sims 2 has been out including everything from Mermaid Cove. I’m wondering why more streaked typed hairs haven’t been made. Someone recently made me a grey streaked hair by combining the brown pooklet version my sim was wearing with the grey version. I don't have that uploaded but I might be able to find the link on her journal that she put up for me.

Although the idea of more life stages is nice, like Peni Griffin said, the programming realities make it impractical and for the most part I think using your own rules, cc and mods is the best way to achieve much of this. Middle age still would have been nice and not too hard to achieve though as it would have continued to use an existing body type.



Well you know you can stop that right? You can turn their aging off, use elixcer or put on an aging mod. I have both a double aging mod so adults have 60 days as well as a hack that lets me turn individual sims ages off or on. EA won't be doing any more with this game, so it's up to us to make it what we want.

When I was a preteen, we had kids showing up drunk for tests, kids went out to smoke during lunch breaks, there was a girl who had a baby, etc, etc. Then when I moved, it was totally different, and then again, I move to another country and bam, the kids act really mature. Around here, it all depends on the area, but in my neighbourhood which I'm moving out of soon, they're pretty mature. My sister's about to become a tween and she's still pretty normal, thank God. My brother, who's just in his teens, is most concerned with dance and performance right at this moment - he has a love for the stage. I think it all depends on the area and the influences, what country you're in, etc. I'm not American, by the way. This all took place outside of there.

That being said, I do use some preteen meshes popular on the exchange, with my recolours, as well as height changes, for when the kid hits the twilight days of their childhood years. Teenagers start off a bit shorter and with some custom meshes as well, and work their way into whatever style. I remember a long, long time before I found this website, my friend and I on another site had successfully figured out how to make a four-to-six-year-old sim, but it proved really glitchy and ended up destroying the game we were experimenting in because it replaced the toddler stage. I was just the tester and the advice-giver, he had all of the elbow grease-type stuff.

For middle aged sims, I usually do end up dressing them differently. My biggest pet peeve is all of the female clothing is so very . . . non-40-to-50-something for adults. There are very few plain t-shirts or sweaters, very few non-flashy pants and stuff, you know, that I really long for. I also started using some CC wrinkles and effects as they age, and put a difficulty slope on them getting a new job if they quit their careers.

I agree with Ella's request in original post.. and like you all did, request the middle age group. On the other hand, why i never asked for this myself? It looks like EA did a balanced job of simplifying real aging with this metamorphisis. It seems the kids go from eight to sixteen overnight. However, real children fit into that stage where they have the curvy body but no desire to get the mind that an older teen would have with curves. On the other hand, the mind-body imbalance can be reversed too. If i had to program all the different behaviors, I'd pull my own hair out. And as others have written, a middle age would people who are still young looking, but have teens and no desire to have another baby. that would change our family sims a great deal.

I hope someone treated Ella's request like a WCIF, although life stages seem beyond the scope of MTS creations. I'm sorry, I don't know where to find what she wants. I'd simply use the wants and certain outfits to suggest an age.