How can you raise five/six children?

My first sim family ever had 6 kids toddler age or younger all in a row (never again), but I got through it because the mom was a politician most of the way through her career, so she just kept getting pregnant and never going back to work before the next kid, and the dad was good old Conor Frio, so he was perfectly happy to stay home most of the time to write and care for the kiddos while the mother went to fundraising parties solo. I always had my hand hovering over the pause key to line up actions when things got too crazy, and I avoided ever using babysitters-- they just mess up the rhythm too much and let the kids' happiness get too low. Having all the cribs lined up in one room helps immensely! Moral of the story: wait until the first kid/set of twins is just about out of toddler age to have another one... and maybe nudge that baby age slider down a few notches to make it all less painful =)

Oh, and don't bother with high chairs-- cordless are perfectly happy with a bottle on the floor

I play on low free will, so it's not always easy. If things get too stressful, I send the kids to boarding school. But I did have one family once that had a total of 13 children, because I decided that every time both of them wished to have another child, I'd let them. There were never more than 9 sims in the household at once, with NRaas Story Progression making that possible, as I moved them out as soon as they aged up to young adult. My strategy was to assign each child one skill that they would continue with for hours at a time, until I stopped them or they finished something, like painting or playing a musical instrument. I also had each of them do fun activities they would stay with, like playing on the playground or playing chess or sim gnubb. So I'd get most of them busy with those activities and then focus on having just one of them doing things that needed more input from me. It worked well. I never got stressed from playing them. However, I found it impossible to get attached to them as much as I usually do to my sims' offspring, because I wasn't spending much time with any of them.

There was one exception though. When the first one aged up to teen, she became responsible for the babies and toddlers in the night, and whenever during the day the mother was busy in her garden or cooking. When she aged up to young adult, the next most recently aged up teen took over those duties. As it turned out, that second teen, who was a twin, was my favorite, so I didn't move her out when she aged up. Instead, she stayed at home until first her father, then her mother, died. Then she moved to another town with the three remaining minor children.

I love families with many children, but they always end up driving me nuts. And it's kind of boring, because I take months to raise all those kids, and it takes too long to change generations. Still, it's a rewarding experience, and it's awesome when my sims have more than twenty granchildren.

Large families can get out of control very quickly. Pause is your friend. Then take control, give everyone in the family something to do. Doesn't matter what it is. Now you have control again.

"Finbar659;d-981016" wrote:
I been playing TS3 very recently. So far my first gen was a single mother in medical career raising a daughter of Xander Clavell who is now a young adult.

Now I'm moving onto 2nd gen with Xander's daughter who is currently dating a son of the Langerak couple who was born around the same time as her.

I'm thinking of having these pair to get married and have children with a newly built house behind a white picket fence.

My pregnancy settings with mods are that gender is 50/50. Triplets = 3% chance. Twins = 7% chance fyi so I can't influence multiples or gender . It's random.

The main question is how do you manage raising so many children? Without cheats of course.

Two words:
Boarding School :D

I use the birthday cake to grow up babies right away. I try to have them potty trained before hiring a baby sitter. With a family-oriented sim, it only takes a day. :D

A lot of patience. The maid is a must, especially if there are a lot of littles in the house. I"m also not afraid of "cheating" motives with the parents so they can get tasks done and make sure the social worker doesn't come to take the kids away. Books and toys are helpful as well.

I forgot about how easy/difficult it is to raise just 5 or 6 children. My games use mods to make the number in a household unlimited.

But - after reading what others have said above I remember how much assistance a live in nanny used to be. I just make a nanny sim and keep them in my inventory for whenever she/he is needed to assist. It is now not unusual for me to need more than one nanny at a time as I'm in the habit of having many babies and toddlers - up to around 15 at a time. But that's another story about my boarding school idea. I collect toddlers and children from around town and teach them skills all at once and the result is my towns are much more lively and full of sims who know each other well and they drop into their old boarding school after they've returned to their parents and do their homework with the old friends.

I also give my sims high autonomy, that way I'm not constantly trying to remember to tell them to eat or relieve their bladders.

Steel bladder LTW is useful.

I have lots of bathrooms just in case there is a rush to get clean before having to go to school.

I try to keep the fridge well stocked with meals any child can grab at any time.

I refuse to have a high chair on the lot as that causes mayhem once there is more than 1 toddler.

I occasionally use play pens and walkers, but I move them to the family inventory when they get too annoying with parents constantly moving toddlers to a playpen when the toddler needs to learn skills that do not require a playpen or walker.

I regularly click through all of the sims portraits in order to check the needs of each one and deal with any that need dealing with. After school I check their homework has been done. Usually they will do it autonomously, but occasionally one starts to avoid doing it and their grades can drop really fast and they are hard to get back up again. I try to keep their school grades on A Grade.

I make sure toddlers are fed and clean before the parents or nannies are too tired to deal with them. That way the toddlers usually sleep through the night. Once they get into a habit of screaming endlessly it is extremely difficult to stop it. Some toddlers are just naturally constant screamers and others can be quite placid regardless of how much care is taken of them.

Toddlers and babies are easier once there are children and teens in the house except with more sims capable of taking care of them it can become a lineup to move the baby or toddler from whatever activity it's doing to some other activity and shuffling them needlessly around cribs is one thing that sims can get into the habit of doing. The baby bouncer/blanket thing is annoying as the sims are obsessed with putting baby into it and then taking it out again.

Another thing I routinely do is cycle through all of my sims to check if they have enough Lifetime Happiness points to buy a reward that I think might be useful for them to have.

Then I sit back and watch the mayhem. Often I record the mayhem and use it to make YouTube videos.

Main thing is to have fun.

Happy Simming

Raised three in real life (nearly went nuts). Sims might be a bit easier if I cheat (drag motives up).