A guide on how to improve your chance of raising kids with positive stats.

[Deputy Dawg]

Kids can be a nightmare, and many players hate them to the extent that they avoid adding kids to their colony at all costs.

This guide will be more effective for players who have unlocked the high quality foods.

A few tips on raising children, so they have a good chance of becoming an adult with positive traits. Also, when your child becomes an adult, they will have the bonus of plenty of points to put into their chosen skills. Does your colony need a maxed out Soldier? Want a "Jack of All Trades" to do a bit of everything? Want to avoid a "Dumb" adult? This should help you achieve that.

If you can, build an empty house as soon as you get a hint that a baby could be on the way. Build a "Child's Bed", a "Shelf for Kitchen Food", a "Shelf for Baked Food", a nice "Chair and Table", and a "Bookshelf for Children". If you're lucky enough to have a "Dream Catcher Masterpiece" in the colony, place it over their bed to prevent "bad dreams".

As soon as the child arrives, try to take control of it's every waking moment. Do your best to deny them free reign to interact with your colonists. Their favourite interaction is insulting people, and this will ruin your colonist's happiness. It's best to micro-manage their conversations with fellow colonists, to avoid bad conversations, whenever possible.

Send them to their new home, and give them "Ownership" of the Child's Bed. Take control of their rota. Their task queue should look like this: "Sleep", "Eat Kitchen Food", "Relax", "Dance", "Learn Life Skills", "Sleep", "Eat Baked Food", "Relax", "Dance", "Learn Life Skills", "Sleep", "Eat Kitchen Food", "Relax", "Dance", "Learn Life Skills", "Sleep", "Eat Baked Food", "Relax", "Dance", "Learn Life Skills". During the Winter, insert "Build a Snowman" into the queue, before they study.

Watch them like a hawk, and continue to top-up their queued tasks regularly. Try to minimise interaction with any colonists, as it rarely goes well. Perhaps, if one of the parents has learnt the "Educate" skill, it can be nice to allow that, but make sure you line up both their following activities and they are not left alone to chat.

Reward Points:
When you grant their Wishes, their Satisfaction meter will rise, but only adults can spend Satisfaction Rewards to select new Traits". When your child becomes an adult, the amassed points will convert into Traits automatically. I'm not certain how the game engine decides which particular ones to go for though. I've always assumed that the happier the child was growing up, the likelihood of negative traits is greatly reduced.

It sounds like a lot of work, but the reward is worth the effort.

One last thing... In battle conditions the kids rota will usually revert to "Learn Life Skills" only. Make sure you reset their queued tasks, to avoid them wandering around on their own.

I hope you find this useful.

Happy hunting!

(Revised on 7th March 2021. Thanks to @BioFringe for his constructive input.)

[BioFringe]

Now we're getting somewhere :)

Add Enjoyed Fire to your rotation as well as increasing their food intake for a perma buff during childhood. Also, throw in some Cake for a nice buff as well.

Something I learned from someone else that really helps in the later game...tell them to use a Fort and they'll just sit in it without losing any life experience. This is good for when you just need a break from them but they are tired of studying.

Point is, children can be a lot of work if you're really going for the perfect kid. Locking them away to eat, study, sleep is a good way to waste a perfect opportunity IMHO.

[Deputy Dawg]

Fort? What's a Fort?

[BioFringe]

Sorry, it was late for me as I meant Watchtower. I only use them for kids, since I don't use archers, so I've come to see them as Forts.

[tyche5050]

Sorry too Say it; I just let them run wild. I just look out for negative relationships and let my adults put them down and apologize from both sides when they go too far. If the spirit are low I let the parents take care of them, hug and talk.
Normally it gos quite well for all of them, work gets done a little slower but all of my Foundys have good mood. They turned out with 0 or 1 learning Point (only if they ask) an 12 to 16 positive childhood point. Sometimes 1 or 2 negative Childhood points are made and become an allergy, mostly I got them when they get jealous of rooms, that's a pain so I build Houses all the same, but I prefer to rise my children in a communal working/ living area with one room for all my kids and more then one child at the time.
One of my Childern got:
Tireless, Optimism, Dipomacy, Loves Summer, Good Health, Loves Pumpkin Stew.
I start early withe the Kids and only take 2 migrants so I have 2 pairs, the rest are homemade. I let them learn the basics that needed at the moment as adults on the Bookshelf and let them work on their Job for the rest of the points, but that's my way. Ist easy to recognize the good adult relationships and to progress without my help only the first kiss is needed.
So after I had a child with 11 negative childhood points and 9 teaching point, asking for 1 good childhood point, I tried this approach. I didn't play farther and had to go back to a savegame so I don't know what would she turn out.
I let them take care of the animals and when they are irritating I let them talk to the animals in line. Works great for the farmer in early game and often got their mood up.
So my way is totally different and I often think they are like herd a bag of fleas. 4 children and 4 adults is so great to watch and funnily they ask for more children.

[laurifen]

I agree with tyche5050. It's pretty easy to keep a child's happiness meter increasing. By the time they grow up, they usually have so many positive childhood points (in the teens, easily) that they get a bunch of good traits. I usually try to ensure they get 2 education points, which I do through a teacher rather than them reading, since it takes less time and they don't get so tired of studying. The skills I drop right into Soldier, and then let them rack up on-the-job experience doing whatever their profession is going to be.

Children can't do much, but they can milk/sheer/tend to animals, and in combat they can bandage wounds and remove equipment from enemies. They can also remove skeletons.

Regarding children insulting other colonists: it's not a big deal. If you notice and can get them to apologize, it's a net positive to the relationship. The kid gets a huge mood boost from it, and the other colonist only gets a minor debuff. IMHO, worth it for the positive childhood points most of the time.

[resieg]

Very interesting discussion.
Learned about a few new possibilities.

My thinking always was to let the village grow as fast as possible. So I managed to have 11 villagers (incl. 2 kids) until summer year 3.

To have only 4 to 8 villagers until the end of the tech tree is a new idea for me. Same with having kids only, no immigrants.

To get 8 settlers is easy and quick. Takes 26 days (10 + 30 + 30 + 30 + 80 + 80 = 260 minutes). To get the 9th and 10th one, waiting time is another 200 minutes each.

To avoid this, I decided to have kids then, instead of immigrants. Kids come without waiting time.

To have the 12th villager, bakery is needed, and that’s quite a long way on the tech tree.

Downside of having a huge community such soon is: Tikis and Pirates get irritated and become hostile sooner.

________________________________________

Caring for kids: First I tried to put both of them together in a kid’s room. But they wanted so many things there, that grown ups went jealous. This disappeared, since I gave them single rooms (houses)

Training: Learning only with the book shelf takes a long time and tires the kids. And when they take a break (e.g. sleep), after that they forget a lot of what they have learned.

So I combine bookshelf with training through the teacher. While one kid is reading and learning by itself, the other one is trained through a scholar. After a while the kids change places.

If there is just one kid to be trained, easily it can do 2 steps in a row. But one has to be careful to have enough skilled scholars for all these different jobs they should do.

Most of my villagers are part time farmers including animal care. When Kids are coming, they will take over most of this job (different types of animal care). With 10 to 14 sheep and the same number of cows, that’s their main daily business. I build queues with 4 to 6 animals for each of them.

Ofc, one has to keep an eye on them when they run wild.

I did not have much bad experiences with insulting. The greener the community is in general (relation wise), the less bad things happen. But I do a lot of mm to gain this (=fulfilling a lot of positive relation wishes).

If kids are eager to insult someone (to get satisfaction points), I even lead them through this manually (provided the other one can take it easily).

[resieg]

Raised a kid now with 18 skill points and 12 education.

[Deputy Dawg]

Originally posted by resieg:

Raised a kid now with 18 skill points and 12 education.

Respect

[resieg]

In my present PT, I will stop with 8 Settlers plus a Kid as 9th one.
Having 10 is quite costly (coin demands) ...

When my Money-making machine runs enough, still time to have more Settlers /Kids...

[Deputy Dawg]

Originally posted by resieg:

In my present PT, I will stop with 8 Settlers plus a Kid as 9th one.
Having 10 is quite costly (coin demands) ...

When my Money-making machine runs enough, still time to have more Settlers /Kids...

I agree that keeping the settler population fairly low is an excellent tactic. I've tried every which way. I had a population of twenty a couple of times, which is a sort of chaotic madness. Seven is quite a nice number, because the settlers demands for housing are easy to manage. Ten is my favourite to aim for overall. It's a good balance between too few and too many.

Happy Hunting

[resieg]

20 ? sounds like a mod ;)

I had 11 after 2.5 years, but got my money down to zero after 4 years (my own fault tbh). Villagers wanted 10 coins a month, and when one is not really careful, this ruins the PT :(

With 9 villagers this will not happen so easily. Have fun.