Have any of you gotten the Sims 4 bug in the past few years? Sims 4 is a life sim game where you build a family and move them into a house you build and decorate yourself. Then you help guide them into making choices and living their digital lives. It is pretty addictive and my kids are finally old enough to enjoy it with me so I’m excited. Which is why I felt like I had to share! We have been playing it lately together quite a bit. My daughter is a home tour girl. She loves to build houses and give us all tours of her newly decorated homes. It is a great way for her to express her HGTV obsession in a fun and creative way. Those hours of watching Fixer Upper are put to good use creating new homes for her Sims. It’s so much fun for her to create back stories for our families and give them their own personalities and then move them into their dream homes.
Recently they come out with an update. Now we can add toddler to our ever growing Sims families. The addition of toddlers has really changed the game for us. It also raises some questions about the parenting skills of my Sims parents in comparison to my own. A few things my sim toddlers do that I would never allow my children to do as toddlers:
1. Be left outside alone. Those sims babies wonder around town with not one of their adult parents. One of those sims babies took off down town in nothing but their diaper. I’m pretty sure I would have been arrested if that was real life. There would be a headline somewhere declaring my incompetence.
2. Play in the potty. Those little sim tots are all about some toilet water. I don’t know if it was just my weird helicopter parenting skills but I didn’t allow my children to use the potty as a water table substitute. I was kinda mean to them like that.
3. Go hungry. Sometimes I hear my daughter screaming at her computer, “Would someone please feed these babies.” They walk around begging the adults for food and no one helps them. I feel for the poor little digital babies. My kids would never have even made it in a Snickers commercial because they were always well fed. Their granny seen to it that. I’m just glad she never found a 10 pound chocolate bar or they would still be hyped up on a sugar rush.
4. Dump paint onto the ground. I would probably let my kids play with paint by dumping it all over the ground if it magically vanished like the sims paint does…real life physics kinda messed that one up for them.
6. Walk around filthy. I noticed one of the sims kids was covered head to toe in black and green filth. Not one adult was moved to clean the child up. In real life I have a feeling strangers would be more than giving my kids a cursory glance if they walked around like that. On a sick day, I left them go to Walmart in their pjs and I thought one lady was going to have a heart attack at the idea I let them out of the house in their clean pajamas. If they had been covered in gunk, you would have seen us on People of Walmart being dragged away by the authorities.
Although they haven’t very good skills at caring for a toddler, they have the Sims 1 baby care skills beat. I knew ever sims that had a baby in that game was getting a visit from social services.
They do allow their kids to play the Sims game in the Sims 4 game. I allow my children to play it as well. There are a few options that I kinda skim over when showing them how to play (like try for baby and Wahoo) but they can explore different styles of architecture and use their creativity to decorate new houses. They can also use those creative skills in designing clothes for their sims (with some outside programs and a little help from freepik). It’s been quite interesting watching them play a game I played when I was just a little older than them. Although the games look quite different, I liked the game for the same reasons they do.
What old game favorites do you play with your kids now?
