I don't know about creating custom nannies, but with the replacement nannies I use, it's not necessary.

Here:
http://www.insimenator.org/index.php?topic=94248.0

These are really well done! I love having a teen nanny, although I may switch to YA since it doesn't make sense to have teenagers doing this work during school hours. Anyway, these nannies are a whole lot smarter than the default nannies. I will say that the teen nannies I've had seem to be prone to breaking the TV, and sometimes I've seen them take bottles out of the fridge unnecessarily, but otherwise, they're smart about toddlers' needs, and they'll clean the house too.

There's also the babysitter mod that allows you to ask an available playable to come over and watch the kids. That's my favorite thing to do, because it fosters a feeling of community among my playables. Babysitters are available in the phone menu under Services. The babysitter will arrive selectable and stay until asked to leave.

The babysitter mod is by AncientHighway, who has retired and apparently took all his toys with him, but I have it uploaded to my MediaFire account here:
http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?2v4nqnibpr6j14v
Not sure what EPs this hack does or does not require, but I have the full game - all EPs/SPs - and it works great.

I also play a 'hood where groceries can't be purchased, though it makes no-difference nannieswise as there are also no nannies allowed. I play that way because it's an isolated island after a semi-apocalypse and there isn't a general store/supermarket.

My sims have to grow their own crops, or buy them from Gavin Newson's market stall when he opens it (ie when he has enough crops to sell). I use the packaging station from Paladin's Place to package the crops and make them more sensible to sell. There are restrictions on the crops that may be grown. And no fish, because fresh water is limited and there are no ponds/lakes.

Thanks for the link to the teen/YA/adult nannies :-) That will come in handy!

That's fantastic, thank you Darby!

Quick question: the YA nannies will work in the main hood, right? Or only in a University subhood?

I really hate this nannies. I mean, they are plain useless. They do a lot of this they should'nt do like prepearing food and then leave it, sometimes they eat but not always. OK, the do clean up but is'nt this a work the family (or the maid) could do? The nannie is hired to take care of the kids but the don't do it. And they always brings toodlers 2 bottles. No, to me nannies is someone you need but do not want (but thats my personal opinion).

I have heard of nannies behaving so stupid that the kids got taken away by the social worker, but I have never persoanlly experienced that. The problems I have had are:
1) When they decide to give toddlers a bottle they don´t give the todds enough time to take it. Instead they will immediately go for another one if the toddler for some reason (like a blocking toy) can´t grab it directly when they try to give hand it over. This result in rooms full of unnecessary bottles (bottles cost food point and thus money).
2) Nannies love to start cook, but rarely finish it. So when my sims get home they will find rotten food all over the kitchen (again this actually cost extra money in the end).
3) I don´t feel comfortable leaving infants in their cribs all they, but that´s what the nannies tend to do. They feed it once in a while and change their diapers, but I really don´t think that´s enough considering they are actually payed for taking care of the children.

So if it´s possible I prefer not to hire a nanny if possible, at least not for a long time (more than ca 3 hours). Some of them are better than others and I enjoy to watch it when they, due to their own stupidity, have their motive failures or when they are just being nasty to my own sims when they get home. But overall all my sims take much better care for the kids than what the nannies ever do (which probably is much because I can command my sims to behave like responsible parents.

When my sims become children nannies are useless, since children can be home alone (I use hacks for that, of course) for a whole day.

link please?

Sort of a BACC with tweaks.
Rather like Lauratje, grown crops from the "farmer". Unfortunately does not produce enough for all the households to be fully stocked. Im thankful that the bottles does not come out of the supplies, or 2 families would have starved to death already.

I will probably gain access to nannies long before I earn my non-locally-made-sellable stuff (wich I stupidly judged groceries to be ). That is the Downtown connection. Oh how I long for my downtown. And nannies.

Lauratje and Gulhare, I figure your challenges don't allow hacks, but if I'm wrong about that, the babysitter mod would make good logical sense for neighborhoods that don't have (so to speak) access to domestic help. Surely neighbors and friends would help each other out, yes? I love these self-reliant challenge concepts!

Victory, YAs aren't restricted to Uni in the first place so yes, YA nannies can travel to the main 'hood to work. In fact, I don't imagine they're present at Uni at all, any more than the elder nannies would be. They may be YAs, but they're not official Uni students.

ETA:

I've seen plenty of players expressing that fear, but I've never heard of it actually happening, unless the nanny just didn't show up properly. The only toddler needs that trigger the social worker if low are hunger, social, and maybe fun, all of which are easy to keep up via Ask for attention and food, and with toys. Just not a big deal. Any player who'd let those needs get that low in the first place...

I think a lot of players assume that a toddler who's miserable and crying from having a dirty diaper or being tired is in danger of being taken, but low hygiene and energy aren't triggers for the social worker.

Automated Baby Controller - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...hp?topic=2385.0
No Baby Harassment - http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/s...b7&topic=2384.0

The Lobonanny Package makes the nannies A LITTLE less annoying. They're still annoying though.

I recommend getting MATY's director's cut package with all the fixes for whatever EPs you might be using.

Oh, I definately do not have any hack or mod restriction, as long as its "in spirit" (?) with the challenge. I already have a mod from simbology wich was supposed work as "ask to babysit" in apartments does (worked just as bad as the regular maxis feature in AL for me though). I will probably give that mod a try.

I've used the Automated Baby Controller, but honestly, it was a little too rigid for my liking. It makes parents drop everything in order to run over to a baby/toddler at the first indication they need something, while at the same time stomping everything else that might've been in their queue. It also makes interacting with toddlers and babies difficult and several toddler actions (especially anything with the activity table) ended up glitching. Generally, if I wanted my parents to be able to interact with their kids in a way that wasn't feeding/changing them, I had to turn it off.

I don't recall how well it worked with the nannies, though; I was too distracted with being irritated at having a starving parent that had JUST sat down to eat suddenly jump up because their baby's diaper needed changing.

The ABC has many settings and I guess it depends on how you use it.

I didn't use it because I micromanage my Sims BUT the No Baby Harassment is really a god send. The babies do not have to be fed every five minutes. Every two diaper changes is enough.

Mine's not actually a challenge, it's just my playstyle for this particular 'hood, so anything goes! :-) I do have the babysitting mod but haven't managed to get it to work yet. I also use a mod that allows the AL Watch Kids interaction to be used on any lot, so I use that instead :-) Currently all of the households with youngsters have someone at home all day, but that may change at some point....

I've also got Squinge's Watch Kids Enabled which sounds like what you're talking about. For awhile, I thought it was the same as AH's Babysitter, but it's definitely not. As you say, it just makes the AL "ask to babysit" feature available on residential lots, but it doesn't improve the feature's function at all.

I think you'll love the babysitter, and it really is in keeping with the spirit of communal self-sufficiency, in my humble opinion. I wouldn't use it in a challenge in which such hacks are "illegal", if I were sharing my challenge experience with others, but on my own, tweaking the rules to suit myself, you betcha! :D

ETA:

How is it not working? What happens when you try?

Instead of using a nanny you could try making a day care centre and using the teleporter mirror. Or there is a hack you can add so you can ask friends to watch your kids. Some nannies are quite good about cooking and not burning the house down. If you make her selectable and she tries to leave she will probably come right back again. That's what I find with selectable visitors who try and walk off the lot anyhow.

People are saying about how terrible their nannies are, but mine are actually good.
They clean up all the rubbish (take the trash out, clean sinks etc),
Play with the children,
Actually look after them,
She even cooked a family meal for them all (but the parents weren't there, so it was a kiddie meal I guess)!
The only 2 problems are:
1. They are mean to the parents/grandparents, no matter how much you pay them.
And 2. They are freaking pool addicts. Seriously, I had a MASSIVE pool in the backyard, and I had to delete it. Hopefully that's a good thing, in case there's an action we haven't seen yet/a new expansion (for Sims 3, I guess)/going to be a new feature in Sims 4 where younger people can drown in their own pool, and the nannies with their 3pic sw1mm1ng sk1llz can save them. If that happens, I will send EA a cookie for finding a LITTLE bit of use for nannies other than being, well, nannies. (It would be cool if they gave ALL the npcs some skill besides their actual job..!)

Actually the service sims do have skills and no "official" jobs - some of them have maximum in more than 1 skill!

I've found that nannies are luck of the draw: if my sims get the good one, all is good, but if they get the lousy one, I worry about the kidlets getting taken by the Social Worker while their parents are gone.

In my Strangetown, the good nanny is Kendell and the lousy one... oh god, the lousy one is Vickie. I hate you, Vickie, and I cheered when you fed yourself to Elmer the Cowplant (Kendell is awesome, though. She just doesn't have too easy of time with Active twins. The Subject twins and Beaker twins both reduced her to misery and bladder failure several times.)

Thanks to the "friends watch children" hack, though, my sims' offspring now have babysitters like Nervous Subject, Frieda Subject, Siggeir Beaker, Lazlo Curious, and Chloe Curious :D

You know, I can't actually remember! I think I only tried it once. IIRC, I called for a sitter, picked someone to come but they never turned up. Will try it again later and see if it works this time though! :-)

I view nannies as just social worker deterrent. If I use nannies (and I never use them for babies--typically at least one of the parents has vacation days), I make sure there are leftovers for children, and in the RARE instance that I use them for toddlers, I make sure the toddler has been fed. If there are twins, so much the better--take care of the Social motive.

My nannies aren't pyromaniacs. They have attention deficit. They'll go to fix a meal, and just leave the stuff on the counter without finishing.

I don't know why my game is so different than everyone else's, but I've never had horrible nannies. I don't think I've even had bad nannies. The only problem I need to watch is when they go all "Sorcerer's Apprentice" with the baby bottles. When I see a nanny with a bottle, I block or turn the fridge until the kid gets it, then all is happiness. But that's the only thing I need to watch for. They play with the babies and hug the kids and make treats and even dinner. I've never had a nanny wet herself. I've never had a nanny that ignored the kids.

This sounds good. All my nannies do is use the toilet.

Well, assuming that the original assignment of the nanny is random, and given that the random number generator is broken, it makes sense that a lot of people would either get the bad nanny or the good nanny preferentially, even apart from statistical clusters. Add to that the force of first impressions coloring later experience.

I haven't used nannies often, because it's more fun for me to have a parent stay home and deal with childrearing myself; and a lot of my households have reasons for preferring not to hire childcare. I've gotten the good nanny twice now even within that limited pool. It's possible that the nanny the Newsons got, who scarred them all for life, wouldn't have been so bad if she hadn't been dealing with twins. The thing that really bugged me was the shameless way she neglected Georgia and spoiled Garrett. She even called him after he grew older! The other children always told her he wasn't available. I think they were afraid she'd kidnap him. But if she'd only been dealing with Garrett, and had spent her entire day paying attention to him, rather than ignoring poor Georgia and even waking her up in order to put her into the high chair to sit and kick her feet while she put Garrett to bed in her crib; and if she hadn't had two high chairs and four cribs on two different floors to play with, she wouldn't have had nearly as devastating an effect on that household.

I know someone who does (or did) more or less that except I think she moved them in and out of the family with the cat, not just move them in for the day and make them selectable. Either way should work fine.

I use Aion1 Nanny: http://www.modthesims.info/download.php?t=286864
I use batbox to keep regular nanny from getting stuck on lot.
The bigfoot if you catch him is a good nanny. He really love those kids.