More Awesome Than You!

So. When one adopts a kid from the mutant pool, and that kid has already been snatched by the Social Worker from a different family, often that kid retains parent links from the original set of parents (but no memories). Game feature or solvable glitch?

It's a glitch. And old, old one from way back to the base game. You can fix it either with SimPE outside of the game or with the Insimenator in the game. It's honestly easier to do it in the Insimenator last time I checked because I think SimPE requires you to set the relations and the family tree separately.

Uh...since when has this been considered a "glitch"? You wouldn't adopt a kid in real life and then draw your family tree with him attached to you and your spouse, because he obviously wasn't yours.  ::)

I'd say the "glitch" here is the fact that adopted children have no memories. It'd be cool to see a snapshot of an adopted child's "past" with memories from it.

Yes but the kids can't have two sets of parents. It IS a glitch because when it happened to me not only was an old parent left on the family tree, but only one of the new parents in the family was set as a parent, the one who called. The other one was not set as family at all, not just the family tree, I mean nothing. They could woohoo with him if they wanted to. That's a glitch. If you adopt, both sims that are married or joined should be parented to the child and sometimes that doesn't happen.

Actually, yes you would. That's what adoption is.

*sigh* I'm talking about a genetic family tree (which, AFAIK, is what most family trees are). You're not going to put an adopted child on a genetic family tree when it obviously isn't.

I agree. An adopted child certainly is yours. My mother was adopted and the people who adopted her are her parents. Period.

I think some people have stange ideas of what adoption is, as if it were just letting some stranger live with you and always considering them to be a stranger and not part of the family even though they live with you.

I agree that irl older children that are adopted, or children of open adoptions or adoptees later in their adult life can retain ties with their birth family, but the game isn't as complicated as that and only lets children have two parents. Plus, if this was their intent I would assume they wouldn't wipe their memories upon the adoption.

Some people don't consider family trees to be exclusively genetic. I can I actually think of several cases historically where lineage has been traced through adoption. I don't think family trees have to necessarily be genetic, if you want to think of them that way then that's fine but that's not the only way to think of them.

My sister is adopted. She resides on our family tree the same way I do, with no differentiation.  Her DNA may have come from somewhere else, but she is the daughter of my mother and father, and she is my sister -- and has been since she was 4 days old.

sara_dippity, I agree -- some people have strange ideas of what adoption is.

Point me to where I said an adopted child isn't part of the family they are raised in. Oh that's right, I didn't.

*sigh* Forget it.

Unless adopting a baby (say for a couple who can't give birth naturally) I prefer to just move the child into the new home.  Then it can be treated exactly like an adopted child except that it doesn't lose any of its previous memories or relationships.  They just fade in the normal way.  But I like to allow them to contact their birth parents from time to time anyway.  You can always do this and change the surname to the new family, then it's identical to a real life adoption.

Well I don't think someone who adopted a child would make a family tree without their adopted child on it and then hang it up and say 'Oh sorry honey, you don't get to be on it on because you're not my genetic child'. And if someone did do that and felt that way I'd seriously question why they adopted in the first place.

If I made a family tree my maternal grandmother and grandfather and everyone I could find before them would be on it, not my mom's birth parents. I never met them. Her birthmother died before she looked into finding any of her birth family and we still don't even know who her birth father is.

To me, a family tree is just that a FAMILY tree. It's not called a genetic tree.  ::)

Well if you're dodgy enough with how you edit things in SimPe you can get the child showing in the adoptive parents' family trees but not vice versa.  That tends to reflect real life too, where the adopted person so often feels themselves to be part of their biological background primarily, at least once out of childhood

I was kind of hoping Pescado would give us a hack for no adoption memory loss. He had a trial one for No townie memory loss on move in and I posted there thinking it would be similar.  The memory wipe actually causes a mess anyway as the kids keep the skills they learned (e.g. learn to study) but they don't remember getting them, so you have to re-do them.  If they've already got to 7 charisma points, I think it messes up the counting too, but maybe that's wants and fears.   It would be much better if the memories matched the skills properly.  Wiping baby memories would be fine and wiping toddler memories would be realistic, but wiping kids memories sounds illegal!  If you have an adopt a teen hack, it's even less realistic.

I think what we're actually worrying about most is incest. We worry about the birth mother and son meeting up later and getting into an improper relationship because they don't know they are related.   The Sims is a lot smaller community than RL, so it's much more likely they will meet.  Of course the adoptive parents are the real parents in  RL and in the Sims, they are the ones who encourage and give permission to go on dates. There just isn't another word to describe the birth mother and father than parents.  And I guess people do have a funny view of adoption unless they know someone who was adopted - I suspect they tend to think wicked witch stepmother and unwanted kids rather than really wanted kids".

The other reason we discuss it like this is story lines.  People set up storylines involving adoption that don't work right because of the way memories are wiped and relationships changed.  I had a child taken from his mother and adopted by his grandma.  That was the story I wanted.  Well his gran is now mum, his mum is his sister and his sibs are nieces and nephews.  He wasnt' related to his Dad at all.  That God for SimPE!

Actually Motoki said that. ;)
Yeah, it would be odd too to have a sim turn into a teen, and because his bio parents are listed in his family tree, he wants to hit on his adoptive mom or sister. Which reminds me of a young couple who were engaged and they went to go meet her mom, who was his bio mom.... Happened to a couple my grandma knew. Anyway.... I bet they were glad they waited until they were married to have sex. That's what they claimed anyway... but would you admit it?

The adoption stuff annoys me too. I had a gal get pregnant by accident and use Inges bush to put her baby up for adoption. Her mother adopted the baby by calling the social worker and that's no big deal. But Pepermint (the birth mother) still remembers giving birth. Therefore it is highly annoying that she can interact with her own child as if she has no idea who she is. I fixed memories with simpe and family ties with the InSim so it's not like I don't have workarounds but still.

I think when a family has their child taken by the social worker (like another family in my hood) they should "cry softly" when they see them after that. Or even just think of them and cry. Same for the kid if it was older than toddler stage when it was taken. But no. Instead they cry for a minute when the kid is leaving and then imediately go to play the piano or goof off like they are happy as larks.

My game was funny about it, I think adoptive kids still retaining biological family ties is a 'glitch', but for me it only happened once. But I liked the glitch, and I think it is dumb the way maxis just wipes all family ties clean. Mind you, they may have a good reason for it; retaining biological and adoptive relationships would be hard, and complicated.

With the Insim..I had no idea it could do that. I really need to experiemnt with it more.

I know nothing about how the game is programmed, but I don't really understand what would be so complicated about it other than from a family tree standpoint. Why couldn't the biological parents remain marked as family? Why is it hard to have four parents when you can easily have four siblings, four uncles, four cousins, etc? If memories didn't get wiped, I don't see why it wouldn't be doable. Then just change the kid's family tree to that of the adoptive family.

Maybe I just think that way because of how family trees and being marked as family are separate things in SimPe.

Well, I'm not sure, maybe Maxis just has weird ideas about, well, familiaral relationships. I mean, sims are allowed to WooHoo their great grandparents.

Truth. The sim in my avatar lives in the same house as her second or third cousin or something, i can't remember, and they have two lightening bolts for each other. Bluh. Luckily they haven't spun up any weird wants regarding each other. Speaking of SimPe, I really should go in there and check them off as related.

Reading these posts has reminded me of something I wanted to do storywise since Uni came out.  I want to create an Oedipus Rex storyline - kill the father, marry the mother & have 2 daughters etc.  I thought I could bring the father back as a zombie and watch the effect on the family. For that kind of scenario, it would be best if they don't remember that they are family until both daughters are teens or YAs - simpe is my friend!

This has only happened to me when I added kids to the adoption pool by killing off the original parent.  If I get the kid taken away through neglect and the original parent is around to get the memory of having the kid taken away, the original family ties are severed when the kid is adopted by someone else.  I haven't tried it lately, but this was the case for me up through Nightlife.

I resurrected Bella Goth a long time ago in Pleasantview.  I had her get pregnant with Brandon Lillard.  Her son was named Victor.  Since she didn't have time for him, and I wanted her to put him up for adoption.  He was a child and she had taught him all the toddler skills, but he was having a hard time watching her flirt with the delivery man, the people she brought home from work, etc.  This was pre-romance mod, so they had a terrible relationship.  Instead of going through the hassle of starving the kid or whatever and having the Social Worker come take him away, I used Inge's shrub to put him up for adoption.  I then had Darren and his new wife Ivy adopt him.  Darren placed the call, but when Victor showed up, it showed Darren and Ivy as his parents.  He no longer had any connection to Bella or Brandon at all.  When he went to college and met Bella, they both wanted to flirt and woohoo with each other.  That just creeped me out.  The same with Brandon.  I wanted them to recognize each other as being biologically related, but I didn't want to sever the relationship of his adoptive parents who took the time to raise him and made him a part of their family.  Since he was no longer living at home, and I think Darren had died somewhere in there, I changed the relationships in SimPE to make Bella and Brandon his parents again.  I believe setting the family flag on those sims would work as well, though.  I did that in another situation more recently.  I always use Inge's shrub now instead of the Social Worker.  I have no SW hack anyway.  It better suits the way I want to play the game. 

I use InSim, but the Family tree mod has never worked well for me.  I get errors when trying to set as parent or sever family ties.  Suspend does not work for me either.  When I go look at them in SimPE afterwards, they may have the flag set on one but not the other.  It's like it halfway does it, but something happens to keep it from finishing.  So I don't use it.  It would be nice if it worked though because I hate having to shut the whole game down to open SimPE and make one or two small changes, then starting the game back up.

Genealogy is not strictly about genetics.  Look at some of the most ancient family trees, those of European families.  The most illustrious, wealthy, and/or titled are not genetically accurate.  You'll see an A + B = C branch, but the family themselves will proudly tell you that C was actually the child of A + the king.  Both of Prince Charles's wives have been his distant relatives, because their great-great-great-etc.-grandmothers were the mistress of some king or prince.  Common law actually says that any child a married woman produces is considered to be the child of her husband, and only the husband himself may challenge that in a court of law.

Sorry, I saw the last post and I just HAVE to comment, I think it's hilarious :lol:

Only the Husband can challenge that?

And how the hell would he know? (Well, maybe if he had abstained from activity with his wife over the critical time period, then yes, but otherwise...)

I'd have thought only the Mother would have been able to challange it - that would make a lot more sense!

So who's up for a Woody Allen story line?  ;)

Common law has been developing over the past 800 years or so.  In that time, there would very rarely have been a case where a married woman would have wanted to prove that her husband was not the father of her child.  Until the past 150 years or so, a non-marital (illegitimate) child could not inherit from either parent.  However, a man might have wanted to allow his wife's child to pass as his if he needed an heir.  The law could not allow his relatives to swarm in and try to have his child declared illegitimate after he died; it would have made estates even more difficult to settle.  So the law left it purely up to the father to decide if he would challenge paternity, and told all his greedy relatives to take a flying leap (denied them standing).  That's largely what genealogy was invented for: inheritance.  Under the old mindset, expecting every heir to be the blood relative of his father was as absurd as expecting every marriage to be for love.

Where are you talking about?  I always assume America unless someone says otherwise but 800 years seems a long time ago for American history.

Common law comes from England and is the basis of American law.  Actual statutes and case law may vary from it (though they're often based on it), but common law is the default that many judges turn to if there's no statute or relevant case to guide them.

To go back to the original topic of the thread, I've had the same problem with adopted kids turning up connected to only one adoptive parent.  Once, a gay couple adopted a kid and she retained links to both her original parents and didn't have ties with either adoptive parent.  I don't think I've had a couple adopt since then, one or the other just gets "insimenated".

I assumed she was talking about Britain, especially since she mentioned European families and Prince Charles in her previous post. 

Europe -- Great Britain, mostly, since American common law descended from British common law for the most part (this offer excludes Louisiana :)).  In fact, marriages based primarily on love rather than social, economic or simply procreation reasons are a relatively recent phenomena in the scheme of things.

In france the queen had to give birth in public so that it could be proven that the kid was royal...I don't think I would want a room of spectators if I was in labour.

Really?  It didn't read that way to me and anyway, Americans always seem to take far more notice of royalty than ever we do.  Mind you, I am a terribly cynical republican (in the British sense, not the American).  It seems she was talking about American common law, originally derived from England perhaps but, by now, not the same as British common law.

I have to admit that the reason I have never allowed my game scenarios to result in removal of children is because of the memory-wiping, something I have a total aversion to in all situations, but also because I don't particularly want a Sim coming back from Uni and falling for her father.  Until a way is found for the child to be aware of its genetics AND its adoptive circumstances, I won't change my mind.  If a situation arose where adoption was unavoidable (such as a child being orphaned) I would simply leave the game, teleport it into whatever family I wanted it to belong to, and let it continue its life there with its memories and parentage intact. 

What I would like more than anything is the option for a step-parent to adopt a child, but the child still remember who its dead parent was.  Similarly, for the children of abductees to be adopted by their human parent's spouse but still know their true origins.  One of my main reasons for wanting this is because abduction is more likely with Knowledge Sims, who in many cases are married to Family Sims.  As I limit the number of children allowed, this is just one less that the Family Sim can have.

I had that happen in my game, actually, in a very odd way.

Sim A and Sim B were children of the same, huge family. Each of them were adopted by different families. Then one adult family A moved out and took sim A with him, and moved in with his lover in household C. His lover adopted a child, and it was sim B. Sim A and Sim B were living together in the same house but not knowing they were related in any way, so they autonomously fell in love with each other after the gay couple that adopted them died when I left the game running by itself.

Creepiness and more creepiness!

*puts lid back on can of worms*