Child to "Teen"

Always has been. Toddler to child too. But then teen to young adult to adult change hardly at all.
That's the problem without gradual growth programmed in.

I suppose we can make hairstyle, clothing and accessory choices to help...

There's a mod you can download that makes teens shorter. It helps in making them actually feel like teens, and you can also tell them apart from YA without even hovering over them.

@NRowe Toddler to child is not a big gap in my opinion. Child to what is called "teen" is. I would be in favour of another age group. So far there are 3 (really). Todller, Child, and Teen/Young Adult/Adult/Elder.

I understand it would take a heck of alot of programming though.
(I didn't include "Baby" because it is a 'thing' that doesn't really do anything. Cute and annoying at the same time, like real life babies. Heh heh! ;) )
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@sam123 I tried some of those mods, but they never worked.

However, I do like that EA and Maxis has finally made a pack, not just any pack, but a full pack to make "Teens" more interesting. Since it's Highschool, that would be on average age 16 to 18. Which really is, if I had to call it something else, "Young Young Adult" or "Newbie Adult." :D

EDIT: I often try to get through the "teen" age in Sims 4 because it is (or was) boring. (Sometimes even skip it and 'age up') But with this High School Years pack, looks like it will not be boring anymore. If a player wants to play it. :)

I wish EA would change the body shape of teens a bit more, even if they left the heights alone for the sake of clothing. Puberty is a thing and it isn't just pimples and mood swings. Bodies change shape. For cis women, that means hips widen, chests develop, etc. For cis men, shoulders broaden and...other stuff...I don't know, I've never paid much mind to the appearance of men! For everyone, people lose the little kid shape, but it doesn't happen overnight.

If this was considered more for the teen sims, I think it would make a massive difference. For now, I'll stick with full edit mode in CAS to get the more gradual changes I want.

I agree the gap is there, but I think it doesn't help much that the teen of your example is dressed quite adult-ish. I try to start out with teens wearing more typical teens wear, like sweater, jeans and sneaker shoes and then I'd proceed to outfits more reflecting their personal style (or their class, even) for the last half of their teenage years. I love the UNI outfits for my teens, they mostly look very cozy and casual.

I think the TS3 had a better transfer f rom child to teen, as teens looked less YA. But I've learned to accept the TS4 ways. When EA did not adjust teens with a pack like High School Years, they never will :)

That's how it's always been so I don't see a gap, if they do anything with height it would probably be in an expansion or expansion release patch otherwise just use a mod.

"Simmerville;c-18164235" wrote:
I agree the gap is there, but I think it doesn't help much that the teen of your example is dressed quite adult-ish. I try to start out with teens wearing more typical teens wear, like sweater, jeans and sneaker shoes and then I'd proceed to outfits more reflecting their personal style (or their class, even) for the last half of their teenage years. I love the UNI outfits for my teens, they mostly look very cozy and casual.

I think the TS3 had a better transfer from child to teen, as teens looked less YA. But I've learned to accept the TS4 ways. When EA did not adjust teens with a pack like High School Years, they never will :)

I'm not complaining. Just was like "Wow what the?" :o
That's what the game randomly chose when she aged up to teen. I often do modify it in CAS to look more like "teen", or just put candles back on the cake and skip right to Young Adult. :D
However with there finally being a pack making "Teen" more interesting to play, I'll probably be having more of them as played characters in my game now for fun. ;)

What I've usually been doing with teens (if I want to play them awhile) is cheat in a whole bunch of vacation days to keep them from being forced into the 'rabbit-hole' all the time. (If they skip classes too much and drop to really bad grades, then the school police take them away and put them in a permanent 'rabbit-hole' residential jail school I guess. :# )

But, if there's an active high-school now, then that will be more fun to play. :)

On a side note, it's interesting in some cultures 15 or 16 is officially considered "young adult". So looking at it that way, I suppose it's not such a 'shock'. A friend of mine's parents were both 17 when he was born so 16 I guess when they started doing "adult" things lol! Married at 17 or 18 I think? Though in the culture I live in, 19 is officially adult.

100 years ago I think it was quite common to become young adult (and even marry sometime) at 16-17. In modern time lots of YA wait to have one child until pushing 40. I guess it takes more freedom to being able to see the entire world, we are global while our ancestors were often stuck to a small farm. In 100 years from now perhaps people won't find time to have kids at all, LOL.

How do you cheat vacation days? Not that it will become a habit of mine, but it might come in handy when playing my residential boarding school.

An intermediate stage would be cool, except then they would have to make it very different for (cis) guys and girls because in those two groups, the development timeline is so different, that you would not be able to have one intermediate step for both males and females, because girls do all the finishing into women, by the age of 16 on average, more like 15 for certain ancestries. For boys, that's the age at which they are just getting started!

I suppose they could make an early teen stage in which they are just kids but a little taller? And maybe give designated female teens small breasts and a slight "shape" but not as much as adults? And make the male ones that same amount slightly taller, only with shoulders slightly bigger than their child self, but not as big as the adult self? It would still depict both a little oddly, because development and height don't progress the same way, or at the same ages, for both, and it would require redoing every single article of clothing just for that very brief period.

The problem trying to relate teens to adults is, we have apple teens and orange adults, so then we need to compare apple teens to apple adults, and orange teens to orange adults...and what about grape teens, and grape adults?

A 'Fruits basket' indeed. :D

At the end of the day, in a game where heights are the same across life stages for all sexes and genders, developmental milestones have to be treated about the same too, even though in reality they are vastly different, otherwise we'd have to split things up and have separate categories for children, teens, and adults, to reflect dimorphic differences in each, and can you imagine the mess that would make?

deleted. A good discussion for somewhere else. A different thread maybe. Sorry!