Teens in Sims 3 have no free-time, they live in a dictatorship. They are supposed to work right after school, even in weekends. Teens have no time for girlfriend/boyfriend, they have to do lessons, work, eat and sleep. On top of that, they can't stay out too long, the police is coming after them treating them like criminals driving them home in a police car. Where a yelling mom or dad is waiting to act even more like dictators.

They also get extra tasks from school, which is ridicilous. I know i can ignore it, but usually when i play with teens i give them the job where they can sleep while working. And i use "testingcheatsenabled true" to keep their needs up - else they won't reach do to do the homework or gain skills. I know there must be some hacks somewhere where teens can have some freetime, and stay out late. But i am not sure if i will use it untill i am sure it does not crash my game. Any advices for a "safe" mod to use, so my teens can be out later and get out of this dictatorship?

I totally agree with you! I usually don't give my teenagers jobs, I just can't handle them when they only get a few hours of freetime a day.

I know AwesomeMod has a "No curfew police" feature. Also, jonha has uploaded one to MTS, but I don't think it's been updated recently.

I don't usually give my teens jobs either, especially if their LTW is one that requires maxing out skills. I don't mind them having a curfew as once it hits a certain time there are barely any sims around anyway, and skill building can be done at home.

It can be quite hard to juggle everything though!

get the NRaas education mod... it allows for homeschooling, aka no school.

hmmm the curfew bugs me the most, since usually my adults' hands are tied, the kids are busy building their skills, and the teens are usually idle enough to go out and collect.

...which is rudely interrupted by the cops.
who, of course, apprehend anyone who just so happens to be out catching butterflies past 10pm, irl. *cannot roll eyes hard enough at this line.*

and they ALWAYS apprehend them.
theres no "run" option or anything. bs. D<

That's the way it SHOULD be. Stupid 12s NEED to be kept busy, otherwise they go and start huffing paint thinner and spraypainting walls. Haven't you seen what happens when you let them have free time in REAL life? They go and annoy everyone by 12ing all over the Internets! Is that what we want? HELL NO! Vile little hooligans NEED their oppression.

Wait. You use "12s" to refer to the teens? All along I wasn't enabling adult-to-12 sex and whatnot because i thought it meant kids, not teens.

LOL--I find the way teens are treated in Sims3 to be completely realistic as that was what it was like for me as a teen. I was in a hellish college prep high school and barely had time to sleep. I saw my friends only in school. There was no time outside of school. But getting back to sims, I see your point. I played a teen Sim for awhile and the game constantly goaded her into the most fiendishly workaholic pressure cooker schedule imaginable--possibly even worse than my real life one had been. It made me wonder if this game is designed by the same killjoys who want to make USA public schools operate year-round and 8 hours a day. You know, the same kind of people who enroll their 2 year olds in a college prep pre-school. Oh, I meet a ton of them. They seem to want to report me to CPS when they find out my child is a "free range baby" who stays home and actually PLAYS WITH TOYS of no known educational value instead of attending multilingual calculus judo violin ballet ninja camp for ages 12 months to 5 years. Bad mommy! Now my precious will never grow up to become a multilingual ballerina ninja lawyer mathematician musician like all the rest of the kids here in Stepford.

The adults in Sims3 don't fare any better as far as a nightlife is concerned. If you try to have a conversation with any adult sim past 7:30 pm they are either starving or drowsy. There is just the most ridiculously narrow window to socialize in this game. I usually am lucky to get dates to stay awake and pleasant long enough for a nice sit-down meal at the Bistro. And afterwards it's a real trick to keep them staying around long enough to say a proper goodbye to them. The whole time, they have the sleepy-face icon above their face. Ugh.

i have to say i think that its reasonably realistic. If a teen DOES get an after school job it DOES leave them with little free time. If you are caught out late at night the cops WILL simply take you home (and if my teen was brought home in a cop car, i might be inclined to give em a little lecture!) and so i dont really have a big issue with it. I tend to grow em up pretty quick anyways. Although it would be nice to be able to "run from cops" or something and have a percentage chance of success... it would also be nice to (like in sims 2) be able to get them part time jobs in the career that they are going to move into as an adult.

this made my day.
...whatever happened to just letting kids play, anyway? it makes me more thankful to have a set of parents like i did, who'd give you a hotwheel car and tell you to go play in the mud.

You can't play in the mud anymore. Don't you know, your kids could pick up bacteria and parasites. If you do, you must douse them from head to toe in Purell sanitizer afterwards or you're a bad parent. Seriously, I ended my subscription to one parenting magazine because it had a photo of celebrity babies at the park or in other activities where they pointed out safety and health hazards with all these captions underneath that said stuff like "Well now we hope so and so will be a good mom and make sure she cleans the kids hands with santizer after they are finished with the jungle gym." And so many parents really take that sort of thing to heart. Amazing and sad. My husband works in the publishing business on the tech support side and he tells me with most of these publications the writers and editors just pull this stuff out of their butts to make deadline anyway. Some rare few really do research and put thought into what they write. But the vast majority of crap we get exposed to in the media and incorporate into our psyche is stuff someone under a deadline simply pulled out of their butt. Kind of like Sims do with monkey wrenches, automobiles and such! We are a society that lives and dies by what stressed out unthinking people pull out of their butts!

Now getting back to topic, getting teens to have any sort of social life in Sims3 involves creating a fabulous rec room and inviting them over to your house. In that respect, it once again is a bit like real life. My sim, Clementine, had a romance going with teen Bob Newbie by inviting him over. But it was hard work to keep his focus on her. The other adults in the house kept spontaneously socializing with Bob. I was constantly having to put them to other tasks so the kids could get some time together. Of course, homework was always looming in the background. Clemmie could barely get a few words with Bob before you could see the kids would need to get some sleep soon and I had to make sure homework got done before then.

Honestly the ONLY way I was able to create a successful happy fulfilled teen with a social life of a whopping THREE friends was to play on aging off, story progression off (Epic lifespan, too--not that it matters much with aging off). When it takes our equivalent of 15 minutes for a sim to just sit their azz on a bed to relax, read a book, whatever, you have to figure they are incapable of getting accomplished in any given day even a fraction of things that an average person can do.

Is that what they're calling it these days?! The Mary Janers and what not?! Sim cops can't let these possible hooligans get away with their antics! First its butterflies, then it's life in prison for drug trafficking! Good riddance I say! These trouble makers should learn to stay off mah lawn! D:<

summersong86: You had the best posts ever :D

No free time is the reason my sim teens never get a job. Unless somebody actually would want a spesific job, then I wold grant them that. But all teens just want A job, which they will forget about by the next want rollout, so I never give it any attention.

My sims also almost never date while teens, this is due to using the rule of six, which means they are teens for only about a week, and it's very rare that I have teens in multiple households at the same time. My sim's life doesnt really start till they are YA, which I have tweeked so it's 30 days, instead of the normal 20.

Actually, i think sim teens have it the easiest.
They really don't have to do homework (go to school and work on late homework)
and they can do a lot of stuff adults can do. Although i have never given them jobs since the parents supply the money.
teen relationships for me are simple. I usually have a certain sim to become popular, while there other sibling is the more skill focused sim. Which is probably why I haven't complained about teens. And I completely agree with the cops busting you for breaking curfew, I can never get away with that

That's the way it SHOULD be. Do you WANT a bunch of bratty, annoying kids running amok?

ABSOLUTELY! Then we would NOT HAVE TO SEE THEM. Just look at how annoying they are constantly 12ing all over the Internets. Is that what you really want? Better to stick them in school and make sure they're too busy to be annoying. When you're older and are stuck with your own annoying 12, perhaps you will understand why. Consider this: If you think they shouldn't be in school that long, why are they still SO STUPID? Clearly they do not spend ENOUGH time in school!

Ah, yes, that's the motive railroad for you. There's actually a piece of code in the game that produces this railroad effect, and the numbers used don't actually match what sims normally experience. Which is why they seem to always need to pee.

I have to agree with you Except in my country they don't 12 on the internets, they 12 on the streets which is far more annoying. 12s should simply be locked away forever. :P

I don't give my teen sims jobs, period. It's too bloody annoying.

As for their social needs, MOST of the time it's perfectly easy just to keep the homework up, let the teen socialize while at school, and work on skilling up in their free time.

As for real life, I have two teenage boys. I tell them that society WILL see them as troublemakers, so they have to be doubly careful NOT to give that impression, though I certainly don't expect sainthood. But I'm also arguing AGAINST my 17yo getting a job right now because to me his schoolwork comes first. Right now, we're paying his ticket, and he should take maximum advantage of that while he can. I've DONE the work/parenting/school juggle and it is a nightmare.

Pescado, when my own kid turns 12, I'll be 50. So, I'll probably be menopausal. That means there will be a pre-teen female and a menopausal female under the same roof! My poor husband! He'll probably want to stick us both in boarding school.

The reason kids seem stupid is because the schools suck the love of learning right out of them and turn it into a boring desk job. And that's for the best case scenario of a good school in a good area. The worst case scenario is when the school is full of drugs and gangs and about as safe and hospitable as prison. That would be the kind I attended prior to making it into that college-prep oriented high school I mentioned. As annoying as the 12's may be, in all fairness I have to say it's still the adults who make the world and the kids have no choice but to find their way in it, according to the rules the adults set and the circumstances the adults create. So behind every brat is an adult or several adults not doing their job. To a point, though. Even kids need to have that epiphany where they realize even really good, really legitimate excuses won't carry them any further and they either straighten up and fly right...or they don't. Consequences are a bitch we all have to contend with sooner or later.

So, in this respect, I'm not so sure Sims3 is really all that unfair to teens in a way that real life is not. It does railroad them into circumstances they can't really change too much, and locks them into a series of goals--choices--consequences and doesn't give them much time to go through that series without ending up exhausted, stressed and struggling for a social life. Really, those are the teen years in a nutshell! Which explains why us old farts are so glad to have it behind us and most of us wouldn't relive those years even if it does mean getting back some looks that faded out. And it also explains why the teen stage of sims isn't much fun, either.

Anyway, I was at my best looking in my 30's--give me THAT era back. Keep those teen years, ugh. Maybe the teens are annoying because that time of life is so freaking effed up! You're smart enough to see the system is broken, smart enough to figure out how to fix it but lacking knowlege and perspective to know for sure, and powerless to do anything about it all anyway. By the time you do get the power to change things, you forget what the heck it is you wanted to change and why, because the system has crushed you under its feet into a shell of the human being you were supposed to be! Well, that's my take on it, anyway. :D

I never have my teens get jobs, they just don't have the time for it. They don't tend to socialize outside of the friends they bring home from school and their families. Actually, being a teen in my game really sucks. Their life consists of going to school, skilling and look after their younger siblings, with the occasional spa day or movie thrown in here and there.

I had much more fun when I was a teen, even if I did have a part-time job. Of course I was a bit of a hellion too.

That IS a problem--there's really only the stupid rabbit hole spa as a hangout place where a sim can get "de-stressed". There ought to at least be a mall rabbit hole, too. Or something else beside Day Spa which really isn't some place teens, at least not teen boys, so far as I have ever seen, would go to just chill out. The movie theater is okay but too bad it's not a multi-plex with shows all day long. I do hope the next expansion pack also gives us something more of a night life.

Playing as Jon Lessen, I did have him do an autograph session and it was around 2 a.m. Guess who showed up to worship John and get his autograph? Bob Newbie! I think Dallas Shadow showed up, too, but a bit earlier. So I guess the teens do sneak out sometimes to meet their rock gods. Big Whoop!

Actually, inactive sims are not constrained by the Teen Curfew hours. Inactive teens can gallivant all night long if they so choose.

On the other hand, the Child Curfew is enforced on all children, active or inactive.

Cheers.

Hey when i was a teenager i wanted to grow up so i could have all the power! Then a grew up and i have the power... and the rent, and the phone bill, and the food bill.....

HAHA anywhos. I have to say i COMPLETELY agree with Summersong, behind every brat is at least one adult that didn't do their job properly, and no, that does not mean getting them into that perfect preschool, that means (as a parent at least) spending that time and setting those boundrys!

I also feel sorry for my hubby, as we have 3 girls, so once they hit puberty, he will have FOUR women around em all PMSing at the same time (and if our girls take after me it will be a warzone) he SAYS hes gonna build himself a man-shed in the back yard but i say no way in HADES is he leaving ME at home on my own with 3 teens!!!!!

so off topic hahahaha how on earth did a discussion on sims turn into a debate on parenting and 12's not being occupied enough!!!!

Jazzem, your husband can always get himself a "man-cave". You'll know which room it is because it will have the biggest tv in the house in it, lol. Honestly from what I have found, talking to friends who have more guys in the house than girls, it's not really that peaceful to have lots of boys, either.

Thanks for the info, Twallan. I haven't yet played a child sim in Sims3. Children in Sims2 and even toddlers seem to have had a fairly rich and full life. And of course with hacked objects there was added fun. I used to like to get rideable farm animals for the little ones to ride and build up athletic skill.

Comparing teens between Sims2 and Sims3, I had a teen Britney Spears and teen Kevin Federline in my Sims2 town and had a funny storyline going on for them. But I couldn't seem to duplicate that level of intricacy for my storyline with Sim3 teens Clementine and Bob Newbie. I seem to find that they have probably the same amount of activities as Brit and Kev had within the house open to them, but despite having about the same number and variety of activities they can engage in, the activities seem to devour the game clock faster so that they can do only one activity before I have to send Bob home to his parents. I wonder if this is actually true or just my mistaken perception. It's been awhile since I have played teens in either game so my perceptions may be off. But I do know I did my level best to repeat the funny relationship that Brit and Kev had, but I just couldn't quite get Clem and Bob to be as fun to watch together. I'm sure that will come with more expansion packs, though.

I still have Brit and Kev available to me. I just haven't been in a Sims2 mood of late but at some point soon I will revisit my town and play with an eye toward comparing the two games more.

What I DO like about teens in Sims3, at least with the ones I've seen or made for myself so far, is that they age up in looks more gracefully than their sims2 counterparts did. If I make a pretty teen in Sims3, chances are if I age progress her in CAS to check her out as a young adult, I'll be pleased with the results. Same thing with going backwards from YA to Teen in CAS. That seems to be true with the boys as well. With Sims2, I was usually in for some unpleasant surprises checking out a sim's appearance in age progression or regression in CAS.

I do also like that now you can choose how a student spends their time in school. I like the option of being able to work hard or goof off. When I went back to play my teens in Sims2, I missed that. They just went to school and there was no sense of how they were progressing in their day, let alone a way to have a say in it.

The curfew makes for some weird storylines, though. A sim of mine had finally built up her relationship with this girl high enough to attempt a first kiss, but they could only meet at night because the girl had a part-time job. By the time they would get to the same place together, after having a chat and when ABOUT to initiate the kiss, the police would come and take my sim away for being out past curfew. This happened at least 3 nights in a row and by the time the weekend came around, the love-interest girl had aged up to YA and their budding relationship was not to be! Instead, when my sim aged up she immediately got pregnant from a guy she never spoke to again...

ok i looked that up and cant find it..... it sounds like something i wanna have!!


and as for teens being repressed.... it doesnt end just when you get out of your parents home. if u try to get a job as a teen and your not in school still they just look at you like your an alcoholic party beast, which i am quite the opposite..... death to the immature teens who ONLY think about alcohol and partys and not bout the future....

and as for not letting your teen work... i can only say this: it makes it more difficult to get a job later! i didnt get many jobs because when they asked me why i didnt get a job in high school i had to say my parents wouldnt allow it and they all looked at me like "YEAH RIGHT!! ALCOHOLIC PARTY BEAST" ugh its so degrading....