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"Aging up" friends. Problem identified.
I think I identified the source of the problem for this.
I've seen at least two threads on here describing the problem. When you "age up" a Sim on their birthday, Freetime is supposed to allow you to age-up up to three townie friends, as well. However, some people (including me) have had problems where the dialog box doesn't open to ask you to name friends to grow up.
After a lot of diddling, I traced the problem down to "agecons.package", a hack that is supposed to let you change the number of years it takes for a Sim to go to the next age. For instance, in my game, I used to have it set so that teenagers only took seven days to become adults.
There are different variations of aging hacks out there, so you'll have to identify them yourself. I made my Agecons.package hack by hand using
SimPE with the directions on Inge's site for extracting it and tweaking it. I never distributed it, but I know for a fact there are many versions out there in use.
To summarize: Modifications of the aging constants (like agecons.package) made prior to FreeTime are likely to screw up your game (only slightly) so that when your Sims grow-up, they don't get the option to grow up their townie friends. Mystery solved.
.....
Other gratuitous observations:
Now that I have got it to work, I was disappointed that when you grow your friends up simultaneously, your Sim falls out of love with his/her townie sweethear who also grew upt. I had kind of hoped that they would keep that red heart thing going. There are so many hacks and cheats for growing up townies already available that it seemed like the only way for EA to make it interesting. So, it's not that big a deal.
Another observation: When you grow up townie friends to adulthood, they become unemployed. That sucks.