Hiya,

I don't even know how this popped into my brain at 7am this morning but I was thinking about how cool it is in ts2 that if a child is taken away that another family can adopt them, and then because I've been on a ts3 kick it made me realize I had no idea what happened in ts3, because in the last decade I've managed to never have one taken away in 3.

However after a good half hour of googling I still don't really know. Some people claim that the child winds up with another family in town via the EA story progression but these posts all came from around 2009-2010 so I'm not sure the accuracy (or what would happen with nraas story progression instead). And the most recent responses I could find from 2013-2014 time claim that the child essentially vanishes from the game and there's nothing the player can do to get them back.

I have no real interest in finding out myself, at least not with my current family obviously, but I can't seem to shake this curiosity. So I was curious if anyone here knew for certain what happens.

The child essentially vanishes from the game and there's nothing the player can do to get them back. However, I have seen reports that the child may sometimes reappear as a Service Sim NPC after much time has passed and they are at least YAs. I don't know how reliable those reports are or if these players are really seeing sims with cloned genetics fulfilling those roles. Those who are using NRaas mods may have more of a chance to grab the child out of the scenario or from the out of town limbo they would land in before they are deleted more permanently, if they act fast enough.

I've never played TS2, but my sense from what other players report is that it takes a bit more in TS3 for the child to have been made so miserable that the child care social worker sim scenario is triggered. And the player should be given ample on-screen warnings before it happens (if it's working as it should). Things like low grades are not a factor, the child or younger has to be unhappy much of the time and not have their basic needs met.

Actually, it doesn't take that much for babies and toddlers to be taken away, especially if you have twins or triplets and only one Sim that can take care of them at any given time. And if your Sim parents' work hours collide and you need the services of babysitters, hope you get competent one or your Sims can return to empty house, or so I've heard. I didn't have that happen in my game, thank goodness, but I've heard horror stories of incompetent babysitters that caused the kids to be taken away. And with Seasons installed, you better watch if your kids aren't too cold or too hot as that may easily trigger a visit from the town's social service. So, yes, it's harder in Sims 3 then it was in Sims 2 for children to be taken away and it's easier to take care of babies and toddlers, but especially if you have more and don't pay full attention to them, you can lose them before you know it, especially if you miss the initial warning in the deluge of all the info the game gives you (or if you have faulty mouse that accidentally double-clicks, like I used to have).

You sure about that? Though I haven't had this happen in a very long time, but I distinctively remembered I was able to adopt the kid back through the adoption agency. But my memory is fuzzy, I may be thinking of TS2.

I am absolutely, positively, 100% NOT sure. Not only would I NOT bet my life or yours on it, I probably wouldn't bet §.50 on it either unless I was given very good odds.

But think of it this way. That young sim you were able to adopt, were they really the same child (or younger) or did they just look like the original? Did they still have any kind of friendly relationships, positive or negative, with their original family or others they had met prior, did they still have any skills or LTR points they may have accumulated along the way?

TS3 doesn't offer a roster of sim children (or younger) to adopt from the agency where we get to select the one we want like we can with pets, all we can do is specify age, gender, and hope for the best.

That's so strange, and oddly heart-warming to some extent.

Does the child still technically exist in the townie pool? Or is it some hidden, inaccessible pool of disowned children?

Well actually yes, to every question. The only thing I cannot remember was whether this was TS2 or TS3, but I am fairly certain it was TS3 because I haven't touched TS2 in a long time and also I don't ever remember my kids were taken in TS2.

The reason I believe it was TS3 was because of the way it is set up with the babysitter, they don't take care of the infant's needs unless you have the cursor selected on the infant. So very early on, I had a kid taken. I used the adoption option and yes, there were no selection. But when the kid was brought over, it was in fact the same exact kid with the name and the family tree link.

What's odd about that, and also to answer jje1000's question, older children are different but babies and toddlers cannot be part of the homeless "household." Children can be, as that is where we get newspaper deliverers from by way of the service pool. So my assumption was that babies and toddlers would at least temporarily be banished to out of world status, but not really in a defined connected world that can then be traveled to.

I've played mean parents before who didn't like kids. But they were always short of being actually abusive until the kids became teens (then the parents became impossible, by my hand, and through the story line I was weaving the teens and one child eventually ran away from home together and landed in Bridgeport). Anyway, the entire time they were subtly but not overtly abusive to the younger kids, the closest I ever got to social worker intervention were two warnings that each took me by surprise because the metric that wasn't being met was Social -- and that's pretty easy to fix usually, if the player notices it right away.

Ahh yes but they can be part of the local minisim pool, which then converts to a real sim when adopted. but all this is speculative. i'll give it a test when i get a chance, im on vacation right now in lucky palm.

Thank you for the replies! The thing I find most interesting is Igazor's comment about how children can exist in the pool but not babies and toddlers, and I wonder if this is somehow connected to why sometimes throughout the day babies and toddlers around my town appear to go missing - I have tagger & always keep the sim tags on colored by age and for about 6 sim hours one of the toddlers was genuinely nowhere to be seen.
Although I think this was more related to the fact that she was meant to be aging up and got stuck somewhere somehow - I could see her when I did MC demographics as a whole but when filtering it just by toddler (or just by child) she wasn't in either category like she hadn't really aged yet and was somewhere hidden between ages.
But I bring up the question of a correlation because she's not the only toddler to just disappear off the map for a chunk of the day. Perhaps because the inactives don't hire babysitters the game just sends them to this limbo land until they can be home again - and if so if this limbo land of babies and toddlers is where they go when they get taken away. Technically still in the game just hidden.

Or maybe all of this is nonsense and my imagination is just all over, dunno.