The Sims 4 Parenting Skill Guide
Being a parent is hard but you can make it easier if your sims gain the sims 4 parenting skill.
With The Sims 4: Parenthood your sims cna learn this skill and make the process of raising their children so much easier.
What is the Sims 4 Parenting Skill Good For?
The parenting skill is a must-have if you want to have well-rounded children who are good people and responsible citizens of the world.
It’s great for giving your sim’s kids a leg up with their character values as they age and can have your sims having the best opportunities as they grow!
How to Gain The Parenting Skill
The first way you can gain the skill is by using a computer. You can choose web > research > research parenting methods. Your sim will hop on the computer and you’ll see them scrolling forums and gaining the skill during this time.
The next way you can gain this skill is through parenting skill books. There are three books you can purchase for parenting:
- Parenting Vol 1: Learning to Crawl
- Parenting Vol 2: First Steps
- Parenting Vol 3: Removing The Training Wheels
You’ll start with the first volume to get up to level four of the skill. Volume two will get you from four to seven and volume three will get you to max of the skill.
Your sims can also gain the skill by talking to other parents about parenting, but this can be slow.
Gaining The Skill With Babies
By far the fastest way you can gain this skill is through spamming interactions with babies. You can choose interactions like talk, rock, cuddle, etc and all of these will give a few points of this skill without tons of effort and that’s the best.
Gaining The Skill With Infants
Since infants weren’t in the game when Parenthood was released, none of the interactions with infants apply to the parenting skill. I’m writing this in late April 2025, so if this changes in the future I’ll change this but as of now, it doesn’t apply.
Gaining The Skill With Toddlers
Gaining the skill with toddlers is pretty easy and most of the things you do help your sims gain their toddler skills which is awesome, two birds, one stone!
The first things that can get you the parenting skill with toddlers are simple things like checking your toddler, playing with them and giving them baths, just basic parenting.
The best set of parenting interactions with toddlers is doing things like reading toddler books, teaching them to talk, or doing flash cards to teach them their thinking skill. These are great because the interactions take longer and will gain the skill for longer too!
You can also start teaching toddlers at a young age smart things like teaching them to say sorry and teaching them to say please and thank you. These will be a great help later with a child’s character values.
Gaining The Skill With Children
The real meat and potatoes of gaining this skill starts with children. You can do so many things with your children and it starts with teaching them to say sorry and please and thank you, just like with toddlers.
Right after you teach your kids these things you can go ahead and encourage their recent behaviour to gain the skill and impact their character values.
The next thing you can do is to encourage or discipline different behaviours that your children are exhibiting. For example, if you have a child who cleans up a mess you’ll be able to encourage that and they will increase their positive character values.
If a child makes a mess or is mean to a sibling, you can discipline this and choose different forms of discipline. As you gain the skill you’ll unlock different things like grounding your sims as a discipline.
When you reach level two of the skill you can start influencing your sims kids to do things like cleaning, or their homework and you’ll keep unlocking different influenced as you go.
At level three you can help influence sims to deal with their basic needs like bladder, hygiene and fun. As they gain the skill they are going to get different ways to deal with these needs that will be more effective.
If your sim’s children aren’t listening you also will unlock the ability to force your sim’s children to do certain things like doing school projects, cleaning up, and taking care of their needs.
Gaining The Skill With Teens
There isn’t much that’s super interesting about parenting with teenagers, which is true in real life. They’re just weird!
You can help them with their needs by using socials like ask to clean self off or have a satisfying chat to help their social need
You can also influence teens to do all sorts of things including their homework, making group meals so your adults don’t have to cook and even practicing speeches to gain a charisma skill.
Ideal Mood for Parenting
Every skill in the game has a mood that is connected to it that helps you gain the skill more quickly. However, this doesn’t necessarily apply to parenting.
The thing is, parenting is a skill that is gained through social interaction and you want those interactions to go well so honestly, a sim who is simply happy is going to have the best time with this skill.
Best Traits for Gaining Parenting
The traits you give your sims are so important because they can influence the mood of your sims and have an impact on their overall skill gains.
- Family-Oriented: Sims who are family-oriented are going to be happy when they are spending time around their family, and since you’ll need to be around your kids, you’ll want this one.
- Cheerful: Parenting can be hard and you’ll want your sims to have as many happy emotions as they can muster.
- Domestic: If you choose a family aspiration you’ll get this trait which grows your relationships with family more quickly.
If you want to make the happy moodlets happen even more you can add some great lot traits to your sim’s house too:
- Sunny Aspect (Requires City Living): This trait will give a sim a random trait from energized, inspired or happy at 6 pm every day.
How to Cheat the Sims 4 Parenting Skill
The parenting skill is a great addition to the game as everyone needs to start at 0 when they become parents and learn as they go. You want your sims to have a high parenting skill so raising great kids is easy!
If you want your sims to be good at parenting from the start, you can use the code stats.set_skill_level major_parenting 10 to max the skill. You can also change the 10 to whatever level you’d like from 1-9.
Levels of the Sims 4 Parenting Skill
There are tens levels of this skill and you actually get a lot of unlocks as you work through it. You’ll see new encouragements and discipline options, new interactions with others and even full parent mode!
| Skill Level | Level Unlock |
|---|---|
| Level 1 | Your sim can now encourage kids’ behavior and influence kids to clean. They can now reprimand bad behavior by asking the child not to do that action or simply yelling at the child to stop. |
| Level 2 | Your sim can now influence kids to do homework. They can now firmly tell their kids not to do bad behaviors. They can also select different options when responding to a teaching moment. |
| Level 3 | Your sim can help kids solve their basic needs like bladder, hygiene and fun. They can also give parenting tips to other parents. |
| Level 4 | Your sim can now give time outs. They will have more information on how her advice will impact her child’s development. |
| Level 5 | Your sim can now ground children who misbehave. For a softer approach they can discuss the bad behavior and hug it out. They also have access to more ways to solve a kid’s motives. |
| Level 6 | Your sim can now make other parents feel better when parenting gets tough. When caring for newborns or infants, they can now see what they need. |
| Level 7 | Your sim can now more effectively solve their kids’ motives. They can more effectively influence their children to perform certain actions. |
| Level 8 | Your sim now has a third option for all teaching moments. They can also more effectively perform discipline socials. |
| Level 9 | Your sim is now persuasive enough that they always succeed when influencing a kid to do an action, like cleaning the dishes. They also know how all of their advice in teaching moments will play out. |
| Level 10 | Your sim can perform the super efficient care interactions on newborns and infants to solve all their needs at once. While performing a lot of parenting duties they can now enter Full Parent Mode where their own needs won’t be much of a problem. |
Influencing Character Values
There are five character values that your sim and their parenting can influence and each will give either a positive or negative trait when the sim ages up to a young adult. Let’s discuss all five and what sims with the parenting skill can do to help:
- Conflict Resolution: A sim’s conflict resolution will give them either the argumentative or mediator trait when they age up.
- The parents with a parenting skill can teach to say sorry to help with this value.
- Manners: A sim’s manners will give them either the good manners or bad manners trait when they age up.
- A parent can influence this by teaching their kids to say please and thank you and encouraging kids to set the table.
- Responsibility: A sim’s responsibility will give them either the responsible or irresponsible trait when they age up to young adult.
- Parents can influence this by influencing their children to do their homework consistently and encouraging them to clean up messes and discouraging them from making paint messes on the floor. You can also have parents work on projects with the child to get them more responsibility.
- Emotional Control: Your sim’s emotional control value will give them either the uncontrolled emotions or emotional control trait at age up.
- Parents can influence this by discouraging sims from having emotional breakdowns and breaking dollhouses.
- Empathy: When a sim ages up they will get either the compassionate or insensitive trait.
- Parents can influence this by getting the children to volunteer as a family and discouraging negative social interactions.
Super Efficient Care
When your sim maxes out the parenting skill they are going to get some great parenting benefits. The first one is super efficient care for infants and babies.
When you click on this interaction with the baby or infant your sim will do everything the child needs to fill all of their needs really fast without thinking.
Full Parent Mode
The other cool thing that happens at level 10 is full parent mode. When a sim is in full parent mode they can do anything for the two hours that they have the moodlet without their needs decreasing at all.
To enter into full parent mode you just need to do a whole bunch of parenting interactions back to back. Just like with gaining the skill, the fastest way to do this is to click on your baby and do tons of baby interactions back to back.
What’s The Best Way to Discipline?
Something that every parent takes a while to learn is what types of discipline work for each type of child, and it’s going to be different for everyone. You’ll need to figure out each child, but being firm is usually best.
When you’re too strict with your children they can often be defiant and just not listen, especially if your sim doesn’t have a high level of the parenting skill.
Once you pass level 8 of the sims 4 parenting skill your sim is going to start being more effective with their discipline and their children are more likely to listen.
The success of discipline is also effected by the relationship your sim has with their children. If you have a negative relationship, you’ll have a harder time. Doing some social interactions with them can really help!
Teaching Moment Pop-Ups
Once in a while when your child is at school you’ll get the option to make decisions for them and influence their character values. These pop-up randomly and will have a little story behind them.
You’ll see that one will impact one value and the other will impact a different value and you need to choose which one to prioritize.
The higher your sim’s sims 4 parenting skill, the better the options are. You’ll honestly want to sacrifice the easier to gain values for the ones that are slightly harder for your sim in these scenarios.
Setting a Curfew
If you purchase the family bulletin board and place it in your sim’s house you can actually set a curfew that your children need to be home by. You can set this curfew for 7, 9 or 11.
If a child or teen stays out past curfew you can punish them for it. The options you’ll have depends on your sim’s level of parenting but a maxed out parenting level will have options like giving time outs, yelling at, expressing disappointment or grounding sims.
If you choose to ground your sims you will get this pop up asking what kind of grounding you want to give them. For this example I chose no phone for 1 day.
Your sims can break their curfew and try and be stealthy and not get caught, but if they are caught by an adult there will be consequences.
You are ablee to reprimand this sim for breaking their grounding and able to go ahead and give them another punishment for this too!
