Can I turn off aging, and keep sims safe from the aging bug?

I had ageing set to long with played sims only ageing as they are being played. Initially, there were lots of issues.* I switched to nobody being auto-aged and the only glitched (?) I've noticed is that when my child aged to a teen, so did her townie friends. This was really convenient though and I don't know if it was a bug.

*Given that I had a semi-famous sim who wanted to hold lots of meet and greets(and was able to invite ghost friends/acquaintances) married to a spellcaster sim who could de-deathify others, this ended up being less of an issue than I initially anticipated.