Hi there! So, this is my first ever forum post, so tell me if I mess anything up!
The other day, I figured out a way to have a child or teen live by themselves without a parent. And the best part is, social services never come! The same goes for pets too!
Below are a list of the things you need to have.
1. Testing Cheats needs to be enabled. To do this, hold down Shift, Ctrl, and Alt at the same time to bring up the cheats menu. Then, type testingcheatsenabled true, and just press enter.
2. Have one adult while creating your household. Customize your teen/child/pet to your heart's content. You can just leave the adult alone.

Alrightey, so once you have those two taken care of, go ahead and get a house. Any house in any place, it doesn't matter. Send your teen sim off doing whatever. Buy a bike (you may need to buy a bike stand as well). Once you have bought it, right click it and send your adult sim to go somewhere on it. Once they are on the bike, pause your game. Then, hold down shift and click on the bike. Then click on "delete object". And boom! Both bike and parent should disappear. This is way easier than killing off the parent, plus social services never come! I was absolutely delighted when I found out this cheat, and I hope you are too! Have fun!

-Blu

I remember always wanting to be a teen without a parent, ahah. Thanks for this!! (:

I've done this for a bit, then realized that I was allowed to make a household with just a teen without doing that... I have no idea why. I have Nraas mods, sure, but I don't have Mover.

ThehueofBlu: Interesting. But do you have any problems when you go into Edit Town mode? I remember that when I was using an early version of Nraas Mover, and I had a household with just one child living alone, if I went into Edit Town the active household no longer showed as active. In fact it just showed as an empty house. So that meant that, if you changed households, you wouldn't be able to switch back again. That issue seems to have been fixed now, but I was wondering if you'd met with the same problem with your method.

There are indeed ways to arrange this with and without mods, but testingcheats shift-clicking to delete a sim of any kind is never recommended with or without the bicycle if you expect to have a long running game going. Doing so deletes a sim's body but not their data and can easily, maybe not in all but in many cases, lead to game corruption.

Teens should be okay, but none of the methods I am aware of will allow a children- or pets-only household to survive if you switch active households. Either the respective social workers will be called or the game will silently declare the household as not valid and dissolve it when it becomes inactive.

It still seems to work for me (using Mover I mean). I just tested it out with one of my households, moving the adults out and leaving just the child. Then I went into Edit Town and switched families, played for a little bit, and then went back to the first house, which showed up green as the active household. The only problem was that the game sent a baby sitter around. But that happens anyway if I go to Edit Town when the adults are out, even though I have a mod that gets rid of them the rest of the time. But no social worker or anything else untoward happened. I remember the first time I tried it I played that household for some time, with my 'Little Orphan Annie', painting pictures and collecting stuff to earn a living, until she finally 'adopted' a family.

EDIT: Mentioning the baby sitter prompted me to check through my mods folder and I don't think I do have a mod that gets rid of them. I might be getting confused with Sims 2, where they were a particular annoyance - you couldn't leave for work an hour before the kids left for school without having to call one!

I've got a household with two kids in Glen Harbor and have switched families a lot since moving them into town without any issues.I'm loaded with tons of Mods though and that might be part of why the household remains intact even when I switch families.