The Sims 4: Parenting Skill Guide

The parenting skill is a brand new skill that came to the game with The Sims 4: Parenthood and allows your young adult and older sims to learn more about raising little ones and turning them into better humans. This skill helps you with raising toddlers and making sure that your sim’s kids are well rounded as they age.

The most interesting part of this skill is that it gives you the opportunity for your actions to impact your kids through building their character values which will eventually give your sims traits as they age into an adult.

With just a bit of time and a lot of hard work and discipline you’ll be able to have some of the best behaved and most well taken care of kids who will be great sims when they age up to a young adult and start their own lives and families out in the world.

How to Cheat The Sims 4 Parenting Skill

Before we get into how you can gain this skill traditionally, we should definitely talk about how you can cheat the skill because we both know a lot of you would rather just cheat it! The first thing you need to do is enable your cheat codes which you need to do by opening up the cheat box with the following methods:

• PC: Ctrl + Shift + C
• Mac: Command + Shift + C
• Console: All Four Triggers

Once this cheat box opens up you want to type in testingcheats true and hit enter and then you’ll be able to use the parenting skill cheat. You’ll then type in stats.set_skill_level major_parenting X and fill the X with whatever level from 1 to 10 of the skill you’d like to have and hit enter.

How to Gain The Sims 4 Parenting Skill

Your first two options for learning the parenting skill don’t involve kids at all and allow you to earn it before you ever become a parent. The first one is to read parenting forums on the computer which you can find under web, this will gain the skill pretty slow but can give your sims a good head start.

The other option is the option of purchasing a parenting skill book. However, all skill books in The Sims 4 gain the skills much slower than just actually doing the skill so your sim will end up working on reading this book for a long time compared to just interacting with their kids. It’s a good option for before you have the kids if you want to start with a higher skill and can be added to gameplay like you’re reading parenting books!

The best way for your sims to gain the skill is by parenting their children. You can earn the skill really quickly by just repeatedly doing interactions with babies since they are a captive audience and you can burst through the first few levels in this life stage for your sim’s kids.

The best interactions to do to gain the parenting skill involve teaching your toddlers skills, punishing your sim’s kids, encouraging specific behaviours, participating in completing school projects and helping your sims with their homework.

It is important to note that teenagers are unable to gain the parenting skill in the vanilla game, which is honestly an annoyance. I understand that teens in the vanilla game can’t get pregnant and therefore can’t be parents, but sometimes they are the main caregiver in a family if the parents are working and deserve to learn this skill earlier so they can be better parents when they do have their own kids.

Sims 4 Parenting Skill Levels

There are 10 levels of the parenting skill that your sims will need to work through and as they work through it they are going to be getting more unlocks like new abilities, and new teaching moments for their kids.

Parenting Skill Level 1

When you first start gaining the parenting skill you are given the ability to encourage your children’s behaviours and ask them not to do things or yell at them to stop doing certain bad behaviours.

Parenting Skill Level 2

When you get to parenting level 2 your sim can now use “firmly tell not to do” when your young sims do bad things (i.e., painting on the floor). You’ll be given the ability to influence your sims to do their homework, which can be helpful if they don’t do it on their own. And you are also shown a few new options when teaching moments pop up.

Parenting Skill Level 3

At parenting level 3 your sims can now give other sims parenting tips as a friendly interaction, and also help their own children solve motives.

Parenting Skill Level 4

At level 4 of the parenting skill you can start giving your kids and teens a time out for bad behaviour and you’ll also get a new option during teaching moments to see what character values will go up or down during teaching moments.

Parenting Skill Level 5

The best part about reaching level 5 of the parenting skill is that you can now ground children and teens as punishment for painting on the floor or staying out late or doing anything else you might not like. You can also now discuss your children’s bad behaviour with them to help them understand what they’re doing wrong and hug it out when things aren’t going great.

Parenting Skill Level 6

When you hit level 6 of the parenting skill you can now have the option to “find out what is wrong” with your baby sims, meaning you’ll see a bubble above them with exactly what they need so you can solve that need quickly. You also gain the interaction to make other parents feel better.

Parenting Skill Level 7

At the 7th level of the parenting skill you’ll see a higher success rate when you’re trying to influence your offspring to do things. You will also see higher success rate when trying to help your children solve their motives.

Parenting Skill Level 8

When you hit level 8 of the parenting skill you will have much higher success when you’re disciplining your toddlers, children, and teens which can be extremely helpful. You also will be shown a 3rd option during teaching moments.

Parenting Skill Level 9

When your adult sim gets to the 9th level of the parenting skill you’ll be able to see the total impact of all options in teaching moments which can help you guide your children in the right direction. Also, your “influence to” interactions will succeed every single time.

Parenting Skill Level 10

When your adult sim hits level 10 of the parenting skill, you get the ability to go into “Full Parent Mode“. This means that when your sims do a ton of parenting interactions in a row, their needs start decreasing slower so they can take care of their little ones.

You also get to use “Super Efficient Baby Care” which means that with one click you can take care of all your babies needs at one time without having to click on different interactions.

Teaching Moments

A great way to increase your sim’s character values and really test your parenting is to respond to things called teaching moments. These are a pop-up that will appear in game that will let you choose a solution to a situation that your child is experiencing.

When you have a lower parenting skill you won’t have very many good options to choose from but as you grow your skill your options will increase. Although a lot of the solutions seem to be okay, there is never a perfect choice and most of them have a bit of a negative outcome.

When you choose an option your child sim will gain a bit of one character value but will lose a little bit of another value. As you grow your parenting skill you’ll be shown exactly which character values will be impacted by a certain decision, meaning you can knowingly steer your children in one direction or another.

Character Values

When raising sims using The Sims 4: Parenthood, you will have different character values that will influence your child’s future behaviour as they grow up. These are available to see in your Sim’s personality panel right above where you’d see the traits.

The way you raise your sim children will influence these 5 values and the younger the sim the more intense the moves in their character values will be. When your child becomes a young adult, these character values will turn into new traits that can influence their personality.

There are 5 different character values that your sim can gain that include manners, emotional control, responsibility, empathy, and conflict resolution.

1. Manners

Your sims can increase their manners if they clean up dirty dishes that are around the house, and set the dinner table (which looks so cute!) and you can increase it if you parent teaches you how to say please or thank you. Your child’s manners will see a strong decrease if they do things like burping or farting or going up to strangers and doing a rude greet.

2. Emotional Control

Your children can increase their emotional control by dealing with their negative emotions. For example, an angry child can go take an angry poop to deal with their emotions. If your sim breaks things and continues to be angry and acts on their bad emotions they will decrease their emotional control.

3. Responsibility

Your child sims can gain the responsibility value by going to school each day, doing their own homework, or going to work when they’re a teenager. If your child starts going to school or not doing their homework their responsibility will decrease.

4. Empathy

If you want to increase your sim’s empathy you can purchase the doctor’s kit toy to increase it easily as a child. You can also volunteer your time using your phone as a family. Doing any mean interactions can quickly decrease your empathy.

5. Conflict Resolution

Your sim’s conflict resolution can be increased if they deal with their negative emotions in a healthier way and don’t throw temper tantrums as they used to as toddlers. You can increase this by apologizing when they do something wrong, or helping other sims fix their negative relationships. If your sims argue with their family members or other sims or get into fights their conflict resolution will go down.

Sims 4 Parenting Skill Success

If you really want to succeed as a parent, there are a couple things you should remember to keep your sims parenting efforts at a high success rate. If your parent is experiencing a negative emotion like tense, embarrassed, or angry, they will have a harder time getting their parenting efforts to stick.

It’s also extremely important to make sure your sim has a great relationship with their children if you want the parenting to go well. Having a child who absolutely can’t stand you isn’t the best way to get your child to listen to you. If your sims are having a hard time with their relationship you can always use relationship cheats to quickly fix that.

Becoming a Super Parent

Since the parenting skill came with The Sims 4: Parenthood, we should also discuss the new super parent aspiration that came along with that and is heavily focused around the parenting skill.

Most of the aspiration is quite easy, but you do need to raise a child who has 3 positive character values (i.e., responsibility, manners, empathy, etc). You should be able to finish this aspiration even if you only have one child.

The super parent aspiration gives you the reward trait of being a role model helps you increase positive character values for your children and will make it a whole lot easier for any subsequent children to get positive character value traits.

If you complete this aspiration you’ll be able to gain over 5,000 satisfaction points which can be spent in the reward store for bonus traits that can help you be an even better parent.

Super Parent Aspiration Breakdown

1. Readily a Parent

• Become an Adult
• Spend $1,000 on Kid’s Stuff

The first stage of this aspiration is extremely easy and requires almost no work on your part, you don’t even need to be a parent to do it! Your sim will just need to become a young adult to satisfy the first part and purchase anything from the kids category that adds up to 1,000 simoleons total for the secondary section.

2. Offspring Instructor

• Become a Parent
• Achieve Level 4 Parenting Skill
• Discipline Your Child, Toddler, or Teen 5 Times

3. Character Coach

• Help a Child With School Work for 4 Hours
• Achieve Level 6 Parenting Skill
• Have a Child With a Character Value within Range to Receive a Trait

4. Super Parent

• Achieve Level 10 Parenting Skill
• Go into Full Parent Mode
• Have a Child with 3 Positive Character Value Traits

Final Thoughts

Parenthood is honestly one of the best game packs for The Sims 4 and really impacts your sims experience each and every time you play with kids in the game. The skill is an awesome way to change your children’s personalities in a positive (or negative if you’re not a great parent) way and really shows off how good you are at being a parent. Happy Playing!