When I first started playing, I was lucky if twin toddlers learned one skill. Then I decided to give Smart Milk a try.

Now I always use Smart Milk.

I used to have a hang-up about teaching both twins to walk at once, both to talk at once, etc....but it doesn't do their aspiration any good if they haven't rolled that want. One toddler might want to learn to talk, their twin wants to learn to walk...so that's what I do. Mom teaches one to talk, Dad or someone else teaches the other twin how to walk.


If your timing's right, one Sim can teach both twins potty training. Sit one on the potty (the one that needs to go more urgently), wait until that child is done, then retrive the other twin from the bathroom where they're playing with the toilet, and sit them down.

One thing I've noticed, it's rather cute--sometimes when a toddler sits on the potty, for some reason they'll pat the side of it.

I give my toddlers smart milk, teach them to walk, talk, and potty then grow them up. I hate the toddler stage.

i teach all 3 and the nursery ryhem, i dont use smart milk but i do you boolprop to drag down the toddlers bladder when its potty training, speed it up to 3 and your done in no time , but with parent wise its usually other siblings at school, dad at work, and mummy at home looking after the younger kids who cant go to school.

when don and nina got married he was at work and she was at home looking after 4 babies/ toddlers, on her own, poor girl i dont know how she coped :')

Yep, I use smart milk to train little sims in the basic skills - usually one a day. A useful trick when potty training is to cancel the parent's action just after the toddler's blue bar flips up to show it's learning. If you time it right, the toddler stays on the potty learning while the parent can get on with making breakfast, showering, etc. - it's a real time-saver and Little Johnny/Janie gets to feel all big and independent at the same time, heh.

Most of my good or okay sim parents will teach all three skills, though sometimes the ok ones only get through two. I like loving capable parents to teach the nursery rhyme too but only because the animation and sound are nice to watch. However, my feckless sim parents usually only get them to pee in the potty by themselves (if you always use the potty when the kid needs to go, the skill is always learnt; even if you miss one or two pees, the kid usually gets that one anyway). What I like to do with the awful parents when they've failed to help the kid learn is try to make sure the kid grows up when it's in the red aspiration-wise - kind of like a penalty for being bad parents, the kid goes forward into life with a disadvantage. I like growing delinquents.

I think I'm getting the hang of toddlers and I'm a little proud of myself. My toddler simmigrant just grew up platinum with all three skills learned, no smart milk, although his older siblings have spent hardly any time with him, his mom has a full-time job, and his Abuela who's home with him all day wasn't allowed to teach him to talk ('cause she doesn't speak Simglish well enough). I made all three skill toys available to him - the only thing I ever directed him to do was use the potty once he got trained - and he naturally gravitated to the bunny and the blocks, so he's got charisma and logic. I'm thinking this one's a Knowledge sim.

Having a grandparent at home is great! But I never thought to lock any of her daily wants, and she's going into the red because every time anyone did something that should have made her proud she was wanting something else; like wanting the three other children to get A+ and her daughter to get engaged when she taught the toddler to walk. I hope I can turn that around or she may go into aspiration failure and die before Lucas becomes a teen, and I'll lose him to the social worker anyway. (On the plus side, that would put a really cool kid in the top of the adoption bin, and I've got gay couples.)

I've never quite figured out how "growing up badly" affects kids (outside of the loss of aspiration points). Does it have an effect other than a bad (red) memory?

Growing up badly shortens their lifespan if you play Sims through to elderhood and death. Red transitions reduce the number of elder days, gold and platinum increase them.

I play with lotfullofsims and the quad hack, so having a set of twin babies and triplet toddlers is something I've done a lot of. Lots of info above, here's my addition: eating pet food makes your toddler DIRTY, sleeping in pet beds if NOT restful (and if the bed is outside & you have Seasons, by-by toddler.) Babies are OK put on the floor, but toddlers need a bed. How you handle your toddler depends on what YOU want: my little future scientist/alien gets smart-milk, get potty trained (probably by the butler), has a comfortable FAST bed he can climb into himself (a custom one, of coarse), and only plays with toys that teach logic, mechanics, cleaning, or charisma. My poor little frog toddlers learned nothing but nursery rhymes (did you know it's Little Thumbalina?") and hugged each other and pets - just because I love watching it. Almost NOBODY learns walking/talking because it's pointless.

Yes, and if you leave your sims in the red you also see a lot more of the failure states and animations: you come across sims quietly sobbing on community lots and see them begging or playing with the mop with a face or flour bag baby. Can make for amusing community visits and will also enhance your atmosphere and sim behaviour if you are a storyteller like me. Also having unhappy sims makes them more likely to behave badly and pick more fights (though that last part might be Pescado's Fight Club mod).

It's not Pescado's Fight Club. I don't have any gameplay mods, and sims whose aspirations have been neglected show up on community lots, pick fights, demolish snowmen, visit their relatives uninvited and hang around indefinitely - anything to get my attention and fulfill some aspirations! Since they can get aspirations on community lots, it's not a bad idea to have other sims date them and invite them on outings when they get like this if there's reasons you can't get back to them. It's harder with knowledge sims since they so often want things you can't get on community lots, but sims who want fun and social interactions can be helped greatly in this way.

I can't stand to see those poor little babies on the cold hard floor! It drives me crazy when twins are born to see the older one spend such a long time unfed, nekkid, and neglected while the second one is born, since no one else can pick them up till the birth process is complete. Kitty Hawkins had her twins while outside fishing, and laid Marsha down right on the edge of the pond where it was hard to maneuver Goz into a position in which it was even possible to pick her up once she was released.

I certainly wouldn't recommend using pet items exclusively for toddlers, but you gotta admit, there's a certain kind of household in which it's totally appropriate! My toddler who spent the most time on the pet bed, Oliver Onions, learned all three skills and then grew up well, first to child and then to teen, with no major hangups in his behavior. He's an independent, friendly little cuss and gets along well with his entire family from dog to brother-in-law. His Ma is a pleasure sim and I hadn't run her aspirations well, so there was a day or two right after he grew to toddler when she was too strung-out to deal with him at maximum capacity, but a couple of outings with friends fixed her right up.

There's a scene in the saga of the Hawkins-Newsons, right before Garrett and Georgia leave for college, when the high-strung Ginger is upstairs sleeping, everybody else in the house is in the middle of an action, and toddler George, rather than holler to be fed when somebody can finish or cancel a queued action, toddles over to the cat dish and starts scooping up handfuls. An aspiration-deprived Garrett (another pleasure sim; I've got to play some more of these and get a handle on them!) is drinking espresso with his overworked brother-in-law, who asks: "How mad do you think Ginger'd be that I'm letting our kid eat pet food?" Garrett responds: "I won't tell if you won't, and anyway after tomorrow it's not my problem."

Personally I think it shows a lot of resourcefulness on George's part. The only pet bed is upstairs so he's unlikely ever to put himself to bed, though.

Ah good - yes, it's great isn't it?



Eh?? ... wha ... oh, no, I don't want to help them. Failure states are fine by me.

The whole Sims thing is really new to me and I've been at it for maybe two weeks. There are lots of weird things that happen and I'm never sure if it's meant to be that way or if something is wrong with the game. I had one family with 6 kids; 2 teens, 2 children and 2 toddlers. The mother was so inept at anything, refused to do anything I told her to do and slept all day and ate at night. The teens took care of the other kids but their social and fun life sucked and their grades were awful because they had to skip school a lot. The husband made it to work one day and refused to go after and wanted to sit on the sofa and watch TV all day. The husband and wife were on completely different schedules so eventually she turned to a flour sack for companionship (all her fault) and he got kicked out of the marriage bed. I haven't played them for awhile because I'm not sure what to do with them, but I think I'm going to move the teens out with their siblings to their own places and "punish" the parents for awhile.
The one thing I really hate is constantly having to micro-manage these people, I mean if I tell you to use the toilet when you have to pee 500 times you should be able to figure it out on your own when to use the toilet.
I do have one family who got their kid's taken away because one of them was failing (which is the dumbest thing I've ever heard.... I mean imagine what our society would be like if they did that here!!!). The parents were big time kid lovers, and very responsible but none of the kids no matter what I did or the parents did could get them to do their homework. They wanted to have fun first but in real life, you do your homework first and THEN have fun. I'm guessing I should have used the lecture tactic that I never tried. Anyway, after the kids were taken away I redid the house (I hated it anyway) and concentrated on the parents social and love life. Soon enough she got pregnant and they raised that one much more efficiently, he's now a child and has an A+ in school and studies mechanics and philosophy on a regular basis (cooking being a close second). Mom just had anther baby so I will try the potty training thing. I did it twice with the first one the first time went really well but the second time not so much. I've tried teaching them to walk but it never seems to work so I quit trying. I think I will freeze the aging process on this baby once it becomes a toddler just to see how it works... I hadn't thought of using it before so I am glad someone mentioned it... Thanks!
Reading these player tips will help a lot including the one on community lots.

GipsiChick, a lot of simmers get frustrated when they first start playing the sims.

When I was a noob, my first sims started a fire within seconds after they moved into their house. I didn't even know the game would run automatically - I had assumed the game would be paused for a CAS family moving in. But it was definitely running and shocked me that a sim would rush to cook a meal immediately when they are too stupid to cook. I had absolutely no control and watched in anger and frustration as they danced and panicked around the stove fire and totally ignored any command I gave them.

I thought that was a pretty lousy introduction to a game, and so I quit the game. I didn't even try the game again for several weeks. But I really hated throwing away my money on games, so I tried several more times to like the game. Unfortunately, I didn't start liking the game until I began downloading stuff - and many mods that prevent the sims from doing stupid stuff.

It took me much longer to stop wanting to throw out the game when raising babies and toddlers. I try to avoid having kids in my game because it fills me with ire just thinking about how stupidly they programmed kids. And I know I'm more bothered by it than most people - obviously, because there are a lot of simmers that like to have a ton of babies popping out frequently in their game. We all play differently and appreciate/hate different things in the game, but for those of us that persevere, we often laugh at our noob experiences and frustrations in retrospect.

And after you start laughing, then you find stuff that you like in the game and become addicted like the rest of us. I know I like the game because I'm a control freak and OCD. I have free will on in my game, but my sims don't ever get to take a couple steps without my explicit direction. I don't get attached to them because I don't really see it as a life simulation, but a creative outlet in story simulation. They are a game and entertainment, but I still want my stories to be interesting to play out. But my mind just goes into overload with kids because I think that part of the game is completely wrong for what I want in the game. So I concentrate on other areas of the game and do a lot of building and decorating my hoods.

Try not to take your first family too seriously and you will learn more tricks as you go along. You won't remember everything you read in the forums or game guides as you play. So pause frequently if you need to, in order to plan what you want to do while playing the game. It is just a game, so you can quit without saving if you want, or start over with another family or neighborhood.

When first starting out, don't start out with big families. Especially not toddlers--and twins at that! I started out with Life Stories, where you can have up to 4 Sims on a lot, and I started out with a family with twin toddlers, and I was getting frustrated with toddlers playing in the toilet and constantly asking for diaper changes!

Kids need to be in a good mood before they'll do homework. That means all needs satisfied. Have them play the piano for skill-building--it gives a good amount of Fun. While it's a simulation, sometimes there are instances where it's not like the real world.

When I first started out, I wondered why I couldn't find washers and dryers under Appliances!

I always try to do that cause I want them to have the memory of being taught all 3 toddler skills.