Parenthood - Should I get it?
I gather the Parenthood pack is fairly popular (at least, a recent Sims Community poll ranked it as the best game pack). Now, I am a big fan of "coming of age" stories. In fact, supernatural or sc...
Forum Discussion
The pack operates on the idea that a child is an empty shell to be programmed with values. Therefore attempts to influence the child in a certain direction will ALWAYS be succesful. Yes, the child may get an annoyed moodlet from having to learn to say thank you, but the lesson will stick.
Sims can only influence children towards negative character values if they already have one of the negative traits. Only bad mannered sims can encourage farting, for example, well mannered and neutral sims can only discourage it. So even though the game doesn't directly judge the player, there's a clear bias towards "correct" play. In an unmodded game it is also much harder to raise a sim towards the negative character traits than towards the positive ones.
You can use the new "Ask for advice" feature in very different ways. If you answer your child/teen's dilemma from the parents point of view, the child will gain or lose points for two of the five character values.
However, with high Parenting skill you get a preview which values will be affected, so if you already know that your young sim will be Empathic, for example, you can always choose the answer that will raise their Empathy. That alleviates the issue of children getting programmed a little and lets them be their own characters.
If you play without free will, you will be locked out of the "Ask for advice" interaction, which is imo the most important tool in this pack. In this case you should get the "No ask for advice" mod, that disables autonomy for this interaction and makes it user-directed instead.
When you use a discipline action (grounding from object use, friends etc.) or give a young sim timeout, I've seen sims become focused from that and the accompanying moodlet even said how helpful that was. It was incredibly cringe, and I don't use the punishments anymore. That isn't to say my parents don't discipline their teens in their own ways (many of my sims of any age are not nice people), I just strongly dislike the scripted ingame punishment interactions.
The Responsibility value I like to think of as Work Ethic instead. It can be a bit annoying to read what the game considers responsible behaviour, but after flicking that mental switch I was fine with it.
With that out of the way, the CAS and BB are really good. When the pack was new, Backyard stuff and Parenthood were my favorite combination.
Sims can only influence children towards negative character values if they already have one of the negative traits. Only bad mannered sims can encourage farting, for example, well mannered and neutral sims can only discourage it. So even though the game doesn't directly judge the player, there's a clear bias towards "correct" play. In an unmodded game it is also much harder to raise a sim towards the negative character traits than towards the positive ones.
You can use the new "Ask for advice" feature in very different ways. If you answer your child/teen's dilemma from the parents point of view, the child will gain or lose points for two of the five character values.
However, with high Parenting skill you get a preview which values will be affected, so if you already know that your young sim will be Empathic, for example, you can always choose the answer that will raise their Empathy. That alleviates the issue of children getting programmed a little and lets them be their own characters.
If you play without free will, you will be locked out of the "Ask for advice" interaction, which is imo the most important tool in this pack. In this case you should get the "No ask for advice" mod, that disables autonomy for this interaction and makes it user-directed instead.
When you use a discipline action (grounding from object use, friends etc.) or give a young sim timeout, I've seen sims become focused from that and the accompanying moodlet even said how helpful that was. It was incredibly cringe, and I don't use the punishments anymore. That isn't to say my parents don't discipline their teens in their own ways (many of my sims of any age are not nice people), I just strongly dislike the scripted ingame punishment interactions.
The Responsibility value I like to think of as Work Ethic instead. It can be a bit annoying to read what the game considers responsible behaviour, but after flicking that mental switch I was fine with it.
With that out of the way, the CAS and BB are really good. When the pack was new, Backyard stuff and Parenthood were my favorite combination.
