I always find it annoying when an older couple are moving out, they keep rolling wants to have another baby (or ten of them! ) despite it's been 15-20 days since the last one. Most of their grown up (young adults) children already start having family on their own so it make me hestitate to fulfill this pesky have a baby want.

Realistically, they are in their 40's (and some mid 30's) with my customized lifespan (symbolical one) and the children are in their 20's now. While it occurs in real life, I feel 15-20 years gap between children a bit too much for literally every family aspiration sim and wish family aspiration wasn't this annoying with this. I tends to mixed when it comes to playing with wants as I always put realism and story-line before fulfilling wants

....Except (Slightly off topic) that teen/ya pregnancy occurs way too easily in my game. I don't like ACR's birth control as I like the idea that they forget to take the pill occasionally ( which is probably more common that shots/IUD for younger people ). I've my own system for fertility and ACR settings and manually change Try for Baby odds and Risky Woohoo based on their personality or things like happens. For example, If a female has three miscarriages or abortions, she will unlikely become pregnant again. Try for Baby % get reduced manually by 10 each birth or miscarriage a female along with reduced by a certain age period has passed and I use rolls where for example10% end up in childbirth (but it make it harder to reach those 10 kids as well).. And that's why the parents are becoming grandparents earlier.

They're suffering from empty nest syndrome, and honestly I know a lot of people who end up with a baby at that time of their life whether they intended to or not. In fact, most I know do unless they have some kind of permanent birth control going on like surgical. I could probably sit here for at least an hour typing out the families I know with large spaces between oldest youngest and their youngest oldest so ultimately I'd say it's all up to whatever you decide.

Personally I think it's kinda cute when the eldest and youngest sibling have a big gap. In my Centowski family, the eldest of their six children went off to college the day before the youngest aged up to child stage. Olivia got to help take care of her two youngest siblings, which is always a good thing. Plus--if you let that sort of thing happen--there'll be an adult relative to take care of the younger kids if something happens to the parents and there's no uncle or aunt available. (It could make for an interesting storyline, but I'm the type to let all my sims die of old age only. Then again, if they had a baby REALLY late in life and died of old age before it was grown, that could also be interesting.) It's also kind of cool when the oldest child's kid has an uncle/aunt who's attending school at the same time as them--which is about to happen in that family, cause Olivia just got pregnant and littlest sister Emily won't be in college yet when that kid starts school.
Anyway, my point is that it happens sometimes in real life and can make for all kinds of interesting stories. One of my favorite shows is about a man in his 30s who finds out at his grandfather's funeral that said grandfather had an illegitimate child who no one knew about and is now six years old, and he ends up taking her in. Stories!

I've several with wider age gap but in my case, it's when their children having kids of their own that live with the parents. An older uncle, sure. But grand kid and child of same age? I'm not sure.. I guess real life situations blur up decisions in the game as my sibling is close to age but tons of uncles/aunts (five uncles and 2 aunts ) and cousins who had their kids in similar age gaps as well. The only difference is that I'm not interested in having kids (nor my brother who are both in our 30's now).

I have for example a sim couple of an elder scientist husband and a much younger teacher wife (late 30's) have a set of twins who are now in real age 19 years old. The daughter got knocked up and the parents wants more children and grandchildren at the same time.

It's basically how I've played families since I started.

Been a while since I did family play in TS2, but I've carried on the same way in TS4. Last family waited until their 3 grown-up kids moved out (one of them took the dogs, because those critters were 100 times more annoying than TS2 pets ever were), and since they ended up with a lot empty family slots, they had a couple more kids. Now one of their next-to-oldest twins have a family of his own (girl, boy and triplet toddlers). I think the original parents are just days away from reaching the elder stage - the dad, at least. For some weird reason, pregnant sims don't age in TS4, so the more kids the parents have, the bigger the age gap between them. TS4 is weird...

Back when I only did family play with TS2, having families with 8+ kids was not at all uncommon in my game. The record was probably around 10-12. I did limit it down a bit after a while, but I still rarely make famillies that end up with less than 3 kids, and I don't really care much about age gaps unless I do storytelling.

The first time I encountered an aunt the same age as her niece I thought it was strange and bizarre to say the least (there actually was quite an age gap between her and the next older sibling). The reason is because although my grandparents had quite a number of children they were older when their family was started and their children (my dad, etc.) didn't start their families young either so by the time grandkids came along Grandma was pretty much past child-bearing age and her "baby" was well into his teens. As I grew up I became familiar with a lot of families with twenty or more year gaps between oldest and youngest so it became normal. One of my friends is next to youngest in her family and her mom was forty-five when she was born. The oldest siblings in that family were born about the same time my parents were. So it's just kind of what you get used to. It's your game, how you play it is your choice.

I've actually been thinking about this a lot more lately since I find that some families tend to have quite a lot of kids pretty quickly - even with the mod set up I use.

I have very long modded lifespans so I use a 9-day pregnancy mod. That puts at least a year between the children more or less, which is super helpful, but it is possible (and fairly regular) for a sim to be pregnant every year with a live-in partner if she was young and fertile. My older sims have declining fertility because I modded my ACR controller so I wouldn't have to futz with it myself. I also play with Inteen, but teen pregnancies have been rare lately since I do my darndest to not leave the horny little buggers alone in the house with a double bed. It's a headache, with all of them rolling wants to go steady and flirting up a storm, but if the parents are anywhere on the lot I cancel their relax interaction immediately.

Some older sims (in their 40s as in your example) I put on birth control. Because I use ACRs settings to determine this, risky woohoo is the more likely choice as a sim gets older, which decreases the chance of pregnancy a bit (I start the hood with it being the same as my general pregnancy setting: 38%, and then decrease it to around 15-20%, and then again to 10% or less when I'm ready). From there I also assign birth control to certain families, particularly those where the mother is wanting to pursue a career or is needed to look after the spawn. I used to try to do it based on education and so on, but I felt like it just wasn't reducing the population boom fast enough so now I just do it when I feel they've got 'enough'. Birth control is not perfect in Inteen unless you use the flavour pack, so there's around a 5% chance of pregnancy still, and then there's a chance that the couple will pick risky woohoo and get the boost from that also.

I will say, the Grunts almost always end up with aunts that are 2 years old and nephew's that are 5 because Tank and Ripp aren't the most responsible boys and tend to get their girlfriends pregnant during high school or university. The General is an old horndog so he nearly always marries someone young-ish and has a whole battalion of children younger than Buck, in addition to his grandkids. And young Buck is exacly that as soon as he becomes a teen, and gets around as soon as the adults are out of the room. That whole family is a fertility nightmare. There will be Grunts in Loste for the forseeable future.

There's an 18 year gap between my oldest and youngest sister, and my little sister is only a year older than our niece. Stuff like this is quite normal for me! I like giving my elder or about-to-turn elder Sims babies because I get so bored during elder stage. One of my Sims is about halfway through elder stage, has 2 adult kids and just got married and adopted a child.

terula8,
Speaking of overpopulation..Even if I use modification with rolls and custom ACR settings, my hood is way too big right now, 1543 playable in 19subhoods and counting. So I probably shouldn't give them those kids all the time. : On the bright side, I plan to put uberhood in an alien war to do some population culling and generally I don't allow the born in game sims to have more children if they have twins.

I don't know how you play those numbers. my largest integrated hood got up to 60 families and I felt that was way too many. 19 sub hoods?!

I attached all custom hoods that came with the game along with MTS2 hoods such as Emerald heights, Widespot, etc and Polygannon as main. I wanted a huge hood because it acts like an actual country I have not counted but I think I'm around 300 households which is record to my 9th generation Withea Dale (historical hood I only cheated with age and had the pixels live on empty lots).

A large amount of the sims were moved in townies who are grandparents right now as I've been setting up the hood because I've been restarting it too many times. Technically, I'm not playing all of them as many act as supporter for the rest of the sims and their lifespan is about 80 sim-days in total. These supporters I only plan to play 1 day of each rotation and then use cheat to age them them the final though (do the 3 season = 1 rotation route).

Fortunately I have 40 day semester from school and hopefully the alien war will help out the population a bit (using military/war challenges to simulate it). Going through every apartment where most of the moved in townies lives are a pain in the butt because I can't click on them in household view.

Once the founders of Tinsel Town have had their children go off to college, the birth control stays on permanently and they can't have any more children. Some of them rolled the fear of having a baby, and that's locked, no matter what they wish for in their dreams or thoughts. Not happening, pixels!

it's the next generation that is going to have the babies, not the elder.
Although there was one exception when Wayne Swanson (divorced from his ever errant wife) decided to get remarried to a much younger woman, who then rolled the want to have a child. That's the only time an elder will have another kid when their adult children leave home for their own lives.

I have 40 playable houses, and believe me, getting them down to about 20 or so through marriage is a real challenge-matching up couples is a exercise in patience..but I'm getting there. I couldn't imagine having more than one hood, as the lot sync timer is overwhelmed with the number I have already.

I'm very strict on the whole issue of birth control, which I think the pixels are grateful for-they have the freedom to do as they like once their child-rearing days are over.

Woah... I only have like 230 Sims and I'm already going crazy with my neighbourhood.

My Sims usually have children a bit later, so by the time the youngest kids become adults the parents will already be elders or close to being elders. From there on out I have two ways to play the:

A) One of their children and their spouse lives with them and they can be grandparents.
B)They just get aged along with the neighbourhood. (like with you a portion of my Sims are only supporting characters)

I don't have them continue to have children just to avoid the empty nest, I have to many Sims for that (though far less than you, OP, hahaha) though ocassionally it happens that there is a considerable age-gap between children, but that's usually just an effect of my normal gameplay, not planned or anything.

I also have a system which I try to stick to, on how many children each couple will have: Family Sim+Family Sim: 3 Children, Family Sim+Non-Family Sim: 2 children, Non-Family+Non-Family: 1 child. So extra pregnancies wouldn't even be allowed.

It's my stupid urge to give the first generation so many kids (some of the premade had 10-12 kids ). Unless they are infertile, I've always have them more if they remarry for genetics sake. I'm probably hopeless with this "addiction".


Orphalesion
Well, I have some rules as well, but the family sims nagging about having babies while romance sims are relying on risky woohoo (their acr settings tends to be lower while having higher risk of risky if they are sloppy and lazy which can be up to 40% ), so I find it hard to get out of the route. I sometimes wish family aspiration wasn't so obsessed with this want.

Well I don't have any risky woohoo or anything, I suppose that helps with keeping numbers down. But, yeah I can relate to being "addicted" to having Sims get lots and lots of babies. Those 230 Sims didn't just appear out of thin air

And yeah I love the genetics as well, so whenever a Sim remarried for any reason, they and their new partner simply have to have at least one baby with each other. And I do break my own rules on occassion. But I gotta stick to them for now. I really don't wanna hit 300 Sims with my neighbourhood.

I prefer houses with kids (because they keep the Sims busy), so a lot of my families have a new baby around the time the older kids go off to college.

My sims generally don't have babies when their eldest children have gone off to college, for a number of reasons :-)

First off, many of my sims don't "go" to college - they become YA's but continue to live at home, attending either their local college or studying at Bigg City College via distance learning. I don't play with college subhoods, but I do have universities in vacation destinations (Takemizu Village and Twikkii Island), so sims may go there to study if they can afford it, and some YA's move out of the family home to live in a hall of residence or greek house at a college closer to home (there are colleges just outside Pleasantview (Sim State College), near to Morrillton (Land Grant College) and in Bigg City (the aforementioned Bigg City College, which also offers degrees through distance learning). The majority of YA's live at home, though, to save money - halls of residence cost money in my game, and sims pay tuition fees, which vary from $3,000 - $20,000 depending on where and how they're studying, so financially it makes sense for most YA's to live with their families. This means that households tend to stay busy (and hence interesting, for me!).

I don't use Try For Baby - I use a combination of ACR (with autonomous woohoo/booty calling turned off), ideal family sizes, individualised risks of accidental pregnancy, risky woohoo and want/fear based gameplay to allow my sims/my game to "decide" how many children each couple has. My sims only woohoo when they have the want to do so (or a fear of being rejected for woohoo), so the need for a couple to have matching woohoo wants greatly limits the amount of woohoo that they have. If one sim has a woohoo want they can ask the other sim on a date, which may lead to mutual woohoo wants and woohoo, but not always - and they need to find the time to date, which can be tricky for some couples with busy schedules. So that limits the number of children which my sims have.

I also play with various "rules" and random rolls to limit fertility. Some sims are born infertile, although some of them can conceive using IVF (which is expensive, so isn't an option for everyone). Others have a greater chance of miscarriage, so they may struggle to have a successful pregnancy. When sims give birth/have a miscarriage they have a chance of becoming infertile (or dying), so some couples are not able to have more children after a pregnancy. The chances of infertility and death are higher for multiple births and for pregnancies from alien abduction. Female sims go through the menopause at somewhere between 40 and 50 yeardays old, though I am considering changing it to 40-55 (to make it more like RL) and having a small chance of early menopause as well. After the menopause they can no longer conceive without IVF.

I also have age limits for adoption - from 46+ yeardays of age there are restrictions on the age of the adoptee, and once the youngest sim in a couple turns 58 they are no longer allowed to adopt at all, because of the risk that they will die before the adoptee becomes an adult. Adoption also costs money - $5,000, which many of my households don't have to spare. Adoptees also have to have their own unshared bedroom, so some households don't have space to adopt.

My sims are YA's/adults for 41 yeardays, from the age of 20 - 61. So, taking into account all of the factors which I mentioned above, it's pretty rare for a couple to have another baby once their eldest children are all grown up. It does happen occasionally, especially if a couple had a baby as teenagers (quite rare in my game, but it happens occasionally) or if a couple split up and the male sim has a child with a younger female sim. Or, though it doesn't happen often, a male sim may get abducted by aliens and have an unexpected, later-in-life half-alien baby! :-)

With Try for Baby I meant the ACR setting, which is in my game simulate how fertile a sim is and then changed manually by various of situation such as fit/fatness, age, birth, grouchy/nice and aspiration and then use risky woohoo to simulate their use of conceptions, birth control I only use on sims who may not have more children as I prefer BC to be manually/daily . Teens are the most vulnerable to pregnancy as they're most fertile (I didn't like the peak in the normal acr setting) and as they get older or having children, their fertility decrease. But if there was a sim who didn't have that many children, they tends to be more fertile longer which is the ones I debating whether to give another child despite being grandparent. Only through teen, a female sim can have up to 11 children during their lifespan, but that's rare. Most have 2-4 and a handful has 6 or 1 kid.

I used to let some of my sims (Family/Family couples especially) have too many kids, and then I wouldn't know what to do with them all because I only have time to play a certain number of households. So having the want for a baby doesn't always get them a baby now! I find that even with permaplat from high aspiration modded out, my older adult sims are easy to keep happy with other wants, and Family sims have grandchildren to focus on and a secondary aspiration to give them other aims in life, plus they have hobbies and friends. My hood population is a lot more stable now and it's easier to give all the sims the attention they deserve.

Depends on the family. If I specifically don't want them to have any more children, they're probably on inTeen birth control. It has a slight failure rate, which I like. Otherwise, it's risky woohoo for all. I've had a lot of families with late in life oops pregnancies.

I have one family that has 3 adult children, 1 teen, and just had a baby. The family was poor when their older children were born, and are now successful business owners, so the youngest will have a very different childhood experience with parents who now have the means and time to devote to him. I liked that they got the opportunity to do it "right" this time.

There's another family with 4 teens (2 sets of twins). She just got pregnant (birth control failure) and I ended it. I liked the symmetry of the 2 twins, plus the parents just want to throw parties and go on vacation all the time, so having another baby would put a serious cramp in their lifestyle.

It depends upon the hood. The uberhood I'm playing right now is full of children of people of all ages. I allow older people to have children. I allow teens to have children. Such is life.

I usually do. It's possible for a couple to have 10+ children in real life, so why not my simmies? Every aspiration has annoying wishes attached to it.
But I've been playing the uber-megahood for a while now and am trying to breed one sim who's related to all the Eaxis-made sims. Yes, I'm that bonkers.
The kids get send off to college to slowly simmer in the student bin, awaiting ageing (so they don't mess with adult mingling), while the no longer reproductive parents get moved to a retirement home. Under these circumstances, my former leniency with family sims was not such a good idea! I overshot the aim of 64 males and females in the student bin, so now I have to go for 128.
Right now I still need to breed 33 guys and 34 gals from eight households. Possible, sure, but I could've gotten to the second generation much sooner, had I not listened to the family sims.
And, of course, every household from the second generation down will only be allowed to have one child.

HOLY MGOFNGNVOINDOFINDONVIN

I've been known to delete hoods because I had too many playable families at once (around 20) and just couldn't keep up with it all. These days, I can do it if I rotate very carefully and keep everyone on the same time zone and even then, Loste is my biggest hood and I think there are around 20 playable households total, counting the university, the one subhood, and the main hood. I skipped a house hold or two on one rotation and nearly scrapped the entire thing. Ages were out of sync, rioting and carnage ensued. I have a back of it that I might default back to since it's now gone absolutely haywire.

I usually like to fulfill their baby wants, but after a certain age I simply let the risky woohoo-option of ACR decide and not "try for baby". Sometimes it works, most times not, so the biggest age gap is now a child 3 or 4 times before becoming a teenager, and her oldest brother is one semester before graduation (teenager stage is 7 days and university 4 days, so the gap is 15 days). It is seldom that my sims have more than 1 or 2 kids if they don't are the family/family combination, and I let them sometimes use the morning after pill too if they haven't the wish to have baby (except for alien abductions).

Given the number of Sims you already have, I'd say the very last thing you need is more kids. Sim populations, as real populations, grow exponentially, so unless you declare a plague and cull a good chunk of your population, I would not be surprised if you start to have technical game issues soon.

That said, generally speaking I see nothing wrong with large families with a wide age spread, either in the game or in real life. My father was one of 14 kids with no multiple births. There's about 30-year age spread between them. My grandparents got married at 17, immediately got pregnant, and didn't stop having kids until my grandmother hit menopause, basically. The youngest was born when she was 47, which was very rare at the time, and then a lot of THOSE kids had large families, too. (And no, we're not a particularly religious family, either. Just a family of Family Sims, apparently, who all have babies and grandkids and great-grandkids on the brain. Except me. I'm not a kid fan at all, even though I raised two of them. ) My dad "only" had three kids, which is considered tiny on that side of the family, especially since my youngest sibling died in childhood and was never "replaced." Me, I've got about 100 first cousins alone, some of whom have already died of old age in their 80s (I'm 55) and some who are two decades younger than me. There are definitely aunts/uncles who are a LOT younger than their nieces/nephews! And let's not discuss second cousins. So yeah, for me having a Sims couple who have a baby when their kids are college age is...not shocking at all.

But from a practical point of view...It all comes down to what YOU want. Do you usually follow wants? Do you pick and choose which ones you follow? Or do you just go with what you want? And what do YOU want in this case? If it were me, I might have them adopt an older kid. It would be a nice gesture, would fill their empty nest for a while, and I think adopting even a teen fills the "Have a baby" want...although maybe you need a mod to make adoptions fill those wants; I really don't remember. Anyway, adopting an older kid would reduce the age spread, if that's something you'd want.