Simple.

Date, date and even more dating. Good for training toddlers use that smart milk for every feeding time. Date, date and even more dating.
Child, that child stove is your friend, date and date some more. Games that help with more than one need are your friends to. Still more dating.
Teen, good for secondary cook when needed and still date, date and even more dating. Teens like to date to.

So all in all dating is your friend.

The fridge values are all 10 Hunger. The price difference is about capacity. Stoves have different scores, but a sim with 6 cooking points and the cheapest stove can still make a filling meal.

I'm glad to see other players mentioning the pause button. Sometimes in the past I used to feel bad about how much I pressed it, haha. Whenever I play the sims my left hand lives hovering over the short cut key. I remember once years ago I had a friend over and she lead playing, I watched in awe as she micro-managed without ever hitting pause.

I look after my sims with *a lot* of pausing and constantly switching to different sims, checking up on all of them. I'm a bit out of practice, having not played much recently, and got a bit overwhelmed with a family of 8 sims. Didn't help that they live in a huge mansion, so it made it harder to see what everyone was doing. I think I might move half of them out for my sanity.

Managing most motives for me is easy, but one motive I'm getting a bit fed up with lately is hygiene. It feels like some sims want to bathe like 10 times a day...
Ok, not that much. 2-3 max. But idk, I personally think 1 shower/bath per day, (or even 1 per 2 days!!) should be enough, but that doesn't seem to work. Sloppy sims should be a lot sloppier, by my own real-life ~sloppy~ standards, lol.

Also I find that sim days go so quickly, and a day can be over in the blink of an eye if I'm not pausing that much. Like someone else said, sometimes I use the sethour cheat to give them more time in a day to do fun things. Someone else mentioned a mod that slowed down time? I might have to look into that, hmm...

Every Simmer I know use the pause button often. Heck, even fast forwards. Even let's player often use the time controlls, so you don't feel ashame of using the pause button. Though actually, OP - you might gave me an idea for a challenge I should post (regarding to NEVER use pause button).

When I play, I have one hand on my mouse, and one hand either hovering over the "P" key or the number keys.

As for motives, I play small households, so managing them isn't difficult for me, even when I'm not being a dirty, compulsive cheater. I have allmenus enabled in my game, so testingcheats is enabled in my game by default. There are times that I'm playing a Sim and I just drag up a motive I don't feel like tending to, sometimes with a little story of why. ("Oh, I'll just pretend that Maddie grabbed a snack on the way to class.")