How to age up a toddler in The Sims 4

Looking to age up a toddler in The Sims 4? While you can wait for it to happen as  a natural event through the passing of time, there's a handy way to trigger it to happen a little bit earlier - blowing out candles on a birthday cake. It's the same for Sims of any age, but with a toddler, you'll need an adult to help them.

Despite being a simple chain of events to follow, ageing up is integral to The Sims 4 families. Everyone has to grow up eventually even if you have long life spans selected in your advanced gameplay settings. Or you're in a coven of Sims 4 Vampires.

With the addition of infants in The Sims 4: Growing Together your Sim's lifespan can now be even longer and more complex, so here's how to quickly age up not just toddlers, but babies and infants in The Sims 4, too.

How to age up a toddler in The Sims 4

To age up a toddler in The Sims 4, you just need to get one of your adult Sims to bake a cake. Do this by clicking the refrigerator and selecting 'cook', you'll then be able to choose from a variety of cakes to make. Once you have one, click on it and choose the 'add birthday candles' option. Once lit, click it again and choose 'help [toddler's name] blow out candles' or 'help blow out candles...' followed by an additional screen to choose a little one, if you have more than one in your household. You'll then see a pop-up informing you the toddler has aged up, and if you've earned any reward traits for raising them well. 

How to earn toddler reward traits in The Sims 4

To increase your chances of earning toddler reward traits, you'll need to focus on helping your toddler level up five different life skills: Imagination, Communication, Movement, Potty, and Thinking. Potty training is important for obvious reasons, and the other four all correspond to a skill for the next stage in life - child. 

For example, a toddler with good Thinking skills will have better Mental skills as a child. Building these skills is really just a case of good care - make sure they are clean, fed and watered, and interact with them a lot. Read to them, tell them off when they misbehave, and fill your house with toys.

There are three skills levels for Potty, and five for Imagination, Communication, Movement, and Thinking. If you get all of your toddler traits to at least a level 3 you will get the happy toddler reward trait when you age up to a child. This makes Sims learn new skills faster, which is a handy buff towards whatever your Sims future aspirations may be.

If you get Imagination, Communication, Movement, and Thinking to level 5 (and Potty to level 3), this will earn you the top-notch toddler reward trait when the Sim ages up to a child, and will make them learn new skills even faster than with the happy toddler reward trait. You can also skip all the hard parenting work with some Sims 4 skill cheats that let you manually alter toddler skill levels.

Want a more realistic birth for your Sim's babies? There's a mod for that in our best The Sims 4 mods guide.

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