No Toddlers in Sims 4?!?

One of my biggest disappointments with The Sims 4 is that there are no toddlers in the game.  As previously mentioned, I enjoy creating and playing families, and, fittingly, toddlers are often a part of those families.  Toddlers in previous Sims games haven’t had a whole lot of things to do, but I’ve always liked them because they made the game feel more realistic to me – people grow up in stages, and skipping that huge stage from newborn to grade school just seems so fundamentally wrong.  But that’s just my opinion.  In The Sims 3, one of my favorite things to do with toddlers was to read them skill-enhancing books and watch them develop their little minds and personalities, all before they hit childhood.  Plus, those great teaching moments of toddlerhood (like learning to walk and talk) were excellent opportunities for adults and toddlers to build their relationships.  I won’t miss those actions as much as I’ll miss the simple presence of something – anything – in between the littlest of babies and the most independent of kids, but it’s still something I enjoyed about previous incarnations of The Sims. 

So far on my Sims 4 journey, I’ve played a lot of families with babies and kids, including babies who have aged up into kids.  I’ve noticed that the lifespan of a baby seems quite short; they’re born and then only a few days later, it seems like these previously incompetent and dependent beings are fully able to live out their needs on their own.  Life doesn’t work that way, and this is a game after all (so it doesn’t need to be exactly like life), but I wish The Sims had something to bridge the lost time in between. 

I do like that sims (of all ages) can have a wider range of interactions with newborns in this game (including various social interactions, and even the choice to breastfeed or bottle feed the baby), but there are things I don’t like about The Sims 4 babies as well.  I don’t like that each baby comes with its own little bassinette and is pretty much confined there until he or she ages up.  It reminds me a lot of the original Sims game, in which babies arrived (spontaneously, albeit) in a bassinette and just stayed there until it was time to age up.