The Sims 4: Age - stages of life Sims 4 Guide, tips
Last update: 30 March 2022
A Sim's life is divided into several stages - from a crying baby, a busy adult, to a senior. Each stage of life provides different attractions and opportunities - playing as a teen Sim is different from an adult. This page describes these differences and suggests how to manage your Sims' time.
Stages of a Sim's life
Each newly-born Sim progresses through 6 successive stages in life: infant, child, teenager, young adult, adult, senior. The current age and the time remaining until the passage to the next age group can be looked up in the Simiology panel [Y].
Each of the stages in life comes with certain rights and restrictions. A child at the age of infancy cannot be controlled in any way. It only lies down in the pushchair. A Sim of the child's age is a schoolkid, whose aspirations and traits you can pick, as it is growing. A teen attends high school and may work part-time. A young adult and an adult are no different, in practical terms: they can enter relationships with the other Sims, they can work, move, etc. In the case of seniors, in The Sims 4 there is no retirement - a Sim may work until the death.
Time management
You can control the elapsing time as much as you want to, in the game options, in "Game" tab. You can disable getting older altogether: children remain children and adults remain adults forever. You can also decide how quickly the Sims progress to the next age group - you do that by altering life span. If you set the life to be "short", the Sims progress to the next stage of life after several days. If you set it to "long", after several tens of days. By default, this option is set to "normal".