When do your sims have babies?

Young Adult. I add in another life stage, sort of, when a sim is in the last half of adulthood by adding some extra wrinkles. That way there’s a transition period between adult and elder, and grandparents in the adult phase don’t look weirdly young.

Mostly Adult but sometimes late young adult. I like my sims to go to University, work on their careers, party at nightclubs a bit and get into trouble before settling down and having kids. I am usually pretty done with their lives and ready to start on the next generation.

Unless they have a family aspiration, I usually follow the sim's lead and wait until they get the "try for baby" whim. So, it varies.

Usually towards the end of young adulthood.

My current couple are about halfway through YA-hood with the lifespan set to long. At first I put off babies because they weren’t a couple when I started my challenge. And then they had too many things to do for the challenge that didn’t involve a baby. Now they are a couple, but they’ve never rolled the Whim to try for baby. I just decided to go for it because I get anxious that the parents will not live to see their children grow up if I wait too late. And I don’t know how many children I want them to have, so better get started now.

In the past, I’ve usually had children really early in the YA stage. I do remember once having an Adult Sim have a baby and I quite liked that because it was different from what I normally did.

@Admiral8Q Actually no, I keep mortal children and feeding on family members is a big taboo. Some get turned or embraced, yes, but not all.

In my current family the reasons for their adopted daughter's embrace is very clearly explained in story that I've written. Their second daughter is a normal sim-turned-mage.

As for vampires - undead. Given that the thirst is not lethal, something else drives vampires to feed. Must be to keep inhuman side in check.
Who really knows but them? They're supernatural, after all. They don't have to make any sense to work.

Definitely later in YA or early in Adults.

When I first started playing I had kids as soon as possible, very early on in YA. The problem is that my sim household would get very crowded later on, because the old generation is not dead and sometime there are even a 4th generation! (The grandkids had kids)

I guess having kids early on in YA is more realistic in real life, because for most people our grandparents gets to see us grown up at least, maybe even having kids. However, for me personally, its just too crowded.

As soon as I am bored with them and want to start a new sim. With the exception of my vampire family. They are my favorite family. Master Vampire married to a human and 3 vampire boys ( they just graduated from univerity ). The Master also has a witch daughter (from his girlfriend) that he raised with his wife. She didn't seem to care and their relationship never even took the slightest hit.

Unless MCCC has them to try for a baby on their own, usually when they both get a whim that they want to have a child after they are married. They are usually young adults.

@floridameerkat I use around 36 days each for the YA and Adult stages. Based on my slightly fuzzy math, that puts the sims in their late sixties when they age to elder, when compared to how long they spend in the toddler and child stages on normal aging. Then I figure that if I give them no more potions of youth, they die in their 70s, if I give them one when they get the first warning about time almost being up they live into their 80s, if I give them another the next time they get that message they live into their 90s, and sims I really like can get one more and live to their early 100s. Sometimes I think about making the YA stage a little shorter and the adult stage a little longer to have a narrower definition of young adult, but I'm just too lazy to change my system now.

On the subject of having babies, it bothers me that pregnancy + infancy takes almost the same number of days as the toddler stage, which should cover around 4 years (ages 1-5). So I either play the pregnancy or the infancy so it's more like two years (in rotational play if a sim is pregnant when you rotate out of that house they have the baby while you're playing your other houses, so I either do that or age the baby up right after birth). That helps a little with keeping the parents from aging so much faster compared to their child than they do in real life, combined with the added days to the YA and adult stages.