More Awesome Than You!

Today two of my sim children came home from school with the want to learn couples counseling. Do not want!  Maybe someone will make a hack for this?

Can they learn how babby is formed?

Uh....No they can't learn parenting....if thats what you mean.... >_>

And does it really bother you? I make my kids learn all they can so they can just focus on their job and making babies when they are adults. I just wish the children could learn parenting and could feed the babies...Hell my 5 year old niece could, my sim should be able to too. D:<

Somewhat off topic, but yeah. Why does that bother you?

Learning parenting is not that bad - anyone can take care of babies.  The thing about couples counseling is that it's supposed to be useful for people in romantic relationships, and it is icky to think about children having romantic relationships.  Would they even understand the point of such counseling?

'Course, I don't train my sims up to be baby factories, either...

I am confused.  Sims 2 has couples counseling?

Apartment Life does.

Yes, there's a variety of new study options in AL.

- Couples Counseling (lets you help repair the relationship between two arguing sims in a marriage)
- Fire Safety (Which I think makes your sim not have a panic attack when a fire breaks out, not completely sure, I tend not to have fires)
- Parenting (Gives you the ability to "check on" a baby and have their biggest need pop up above their head, food/hygiene/etc)
- Anger Management (Less likely to become furious and fury lasts less time)
- Lifelong Happiness (I think their aspiration meter goes down slower)

...I may be forgetting one...

Anyway, I agree that it's wierd children can learn couples counseling. Especially considering I don't think they can learn parenting. You would think they'd learn to take care of an infant much sooner than they'd learn about adult relationships and all that entails. One of my sim children rolled up this one and it struck me as a wee bit odd but I didn't think about it too much until she finished and she got the usual "I've learned it" popup. "Sometimes love just isn't enough, and when it isn't, I'll be there to help smooth things out!" ...Kinda creepy and sad from a child.  :'( None of mine will ever learn that before adulthood again, nope!

Wouldn't mind a hack to make them stop rolling that as a want. And possibly to enable learning parenting, too, but that isn't a big deal.

Well, ya know, kids are always depicted as freakishly good at mending relationships/setting people up, aren't they?  I mean, how many variations of The Parent Trap have they made?

Physiology.
And if they study it they get the same faster skill building bug as anyone else.

Children learning couples' counseling is just creepy to me. Fire Safety? Sure. Even anger management, if they're in a furious kinda place. I can see a kid/teen rolling a want to learn couples' counseling if, say, their mom just caught their dad bumpin' uglies with the maid, but it's just not reasonable to have sim kids mucking about anywhere near this particular skill set. Yeah, Mommy and Daddy were on the verge of divorce until Junior took a break from his game of Cops & Robbers to come navigate the murky waters of human interpersonal dynamics.

It doesn't hit me as odd. I see it as them wanting to learn how to have a good marriage later on in life, perhaps because they want to have a happy family just like Mommy & Daddy do, or perhaps because they saw Mommy kissing the mailman and Daddy getting it on with his coworker.

Most of my sim kids want to learn Physiology. Only one so far has wanted to learn couples counseling.

Whatever gave you the impression that it bothers me?  Did you see the link in my signature? I'm Norwegian, we had books like that around at my kindergarden.

My kindergarten had that book too. IIRC, somewhere it says "You can ask your mother of father or another adult you trust to read this book with you."
I think it scarred me for life to hear this book being read aloud SO MANY TIMES. I remember being scared by the picture where the mother gives birth "The baby comes out WHERE?!"

Of course, for a child to be comfortable about babies coming out of their "bottoms" they need to feel comfortable about their "bottoms" in the first place.  By the time a child has had all the usual modesty hangups hung on them, it's probably kinder not to worry them with the natural healthy things those bottoms can be involved in until they're old enough to have found out that organs of generation can be fun and functional, not just something dirty you have to keep hidden when there are people around.  In natural life, a child would have seen from as soon as its eyes were open that everyone has genitals, and by about one year old they would have seen things coming in and out of some of those genitals forming part of the natural lifecycle - all before they were old enough to be fitted with their own fig leaf!

Sims don't have genitals.

Would *THEY* understand? Hell, *I* don't even understand. It utterly eludes me why you would want to force a relationship that is clearly not functioning. This strikes me as being like that "Tard Logic" picture showing a square peg being bashed into a round hole by repeated, inaccurate hammering. Someone find me that image? Because that's what "Couples Counseling" sounds like to me. Frankly, it seems useless and I only included it on the Skillinator for completeness.

(http://i37.tinypic.com/6zsluf.jpg)

Similar, but not the same one. That one was done with a toddler toy set, and there were hammer dents everywhere, and it was one of those demotivator-style ones.

The book I was given was much more graphic. Everything was still cartoonized, but very much anatomically correct.

I got to watch a video.

I got to watch how it worked with a pig. Humans work out much the same.

Yeah, I don't see myself ever using it either, but learning it seems to give my family sims aspiration points when I won't let them have any more babies.

My mother bought me a book talking about "special hugs" when I was about 8.  My best friends parents are doctors so she'd already giving me the full story.  After my mum had finished her "special hugs" story I shocked her a bit with my learningz.

Then we got the video as well.

I don't actually remember learning about how babby is formed; I just sort of always knew, as far as I can remember. My mother did whip a couple of "So your body is going through some changes..." books on me when I was pre-12, but none of the info in them was really new to me. Guess they must have portioned out the necessary tidbits in easy-to-swallow chunks as I was growing up, since there wasn't any real talk/video/book/puppet show "event" that explained the whole kaboodle. That, or I picked it all up at the playground.

That said, accidentally spotting a friend's grandfather's porn (shudder) at the age of 86 was quite the eye-opening shocker. "He's putting his tongue WHERE?!"

Square peg meets round hole
(http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3071/2898778856_bf03f427d9.jpg?v=0)

And you reached the age of 86 before you knew about oral sex?   :o

And how old was the friend's grandfather, in that case?

Hur. :p
Given I was eight six (improved clarity is clearer) at the time, there's no telling how old "old people" really were back then. Now that I've been 36 for a couple of years, I'm noting the criterion for "old person" is a lot higher than it use to be!

I see what you did there.

My definition of old hasn't changed, but then my definition of old was always around 90. I spent more time with older relatives, especially my grandparents, when I was young, and enjoyed most things they did.

I was referring to the OP.

But I wish I had a book or video...growing up in Las Vegas back then when you can put phone sex/cigarette/porn adds in newspapers and on tv during the day time...It wasn't all that hard to figure out why the hooker next to the homeless shelter has a baby bump after you happen to hear "Sex makes babies" randomly from someone's parents.