Sims 3 Life Stages Strategy: Child

The first two stages of life, baby and toddler, are pretty strategy-free.  You feed the kids, change the kids, teach your toddlers the Big Three if you can (walk, talk, and use the potty) and hope things don't go bad enough that the social worker shows up.

Child is the first life stage where you can really do stuff.  But can you?  I was a little frustrated recently, with a character stuck in the Child stage, wondering what to do now.  

The first big change is that children go to school.  They get homework, just as they did in the previous versions, but with Sims 3 they introduced the ability to make your kids do their late homework at school.  As far as I can tell, there is no penalty for doing late homework at school.  So why bother making your kids do homework at home?  (Except for kids with the Good trait, of course, who will spontaneously do homework without being asked.)

According to the resources I've read, in order to choose a fourth trait when your child ages into a teen, they need to be carrying an A grade.  So if there is a trait that you really want, the best strategy is to homework your kid up to an A (take an Opportunity if you have to, since these can improve the kid's grades) then quickly use the birthday cake to age them up.

Unlike the Teen stage, Child doesn't seem to have much opportunity for skill building.  You can't read a Cooking, Charisma, Gardening, or Handiness manual.  You can swim and do other athletic things, but it doesn't seem to build your Athletic skill.  

What you can do as a Child is improve your Logic skill and your Fishing ability.  My child Sims spend an awful lot of time at the chess board and the nearest pond!  Children can also read the Logic book (which I believe is the only skill book they can access.)

Children can go out on the town unsupervised, which means that you can send them out to do the grocery and book shopping if you like.  The real benefit to children is that they come home from school early (school gets out at 3PM) and you can send them out to collect gems, seeds, or whatever else you're looking for.  

Now granted, children won't have enough happiness rewards to purchase their own Collection Helper.  However, if you have an adult who has enough points to purchase it, they can give it to their child.  Simply drag the Collection Helper out of the adult's inventory and onto the ground.  Then switch over to your child, and drag the Collection Helper into their own inventory.  

Presto, you now have a Dickensian child labor machine!  The biggest down side to sending kids out to collect stuff for your family is that they can't drive cars.  Since children are stuck on bikes, it can take a lot longer to clear the map than it would for an adult.  

Other than that, I honestly don't feel that children are very useful.  I invariably end up aging my children up early with the birthday cake.