In The Sims 4, there’s a feature that allows you to download Sims that other players have made. Looking for a hot guy for your Sim to hook up with? Head to the gallery and download one. Need a single mom with two cats and a dog? You can find one, as long as someone made one. Based on what’s on the gallery right now, it seems like a lot of Simmers are into making pregnant teenagers.
If you log into the game and check the box that allows Sims with custom content to show up in search, and then search “pregnant” in the gallery, the abundance of pregnant teenage Sims is startling. There are teens pregnant with quadruplets and pregnant teenagers that also have dogs or cats. Some of them come packaged with their mothers, who are often also pregnant, and some have the father of the baby in the household as well. More often than not, however, these Sims are alone. Their descriptions sometimes specify how many children they’re expecting, and many of them are pregnant with twins.
Teenage pregnancies aren’t possible in The Sims 4 by default. Sims have seven stages of life, from Babies to the Elderly. In the official version of the game, only Young Adults (who are implied to be in their early 20s) and Adults can get pregnant. With the use of mods like Wicked Whims, players can play out their 16 And Pregnant fantasies. One Redditor found a family uploaded to the gallery that had been modded to allow for children to get pregnant, which Wicked Whims does not allow.
Carrying a baby in The Sims isn’t that bad. Sometimes pregnant Sims throw up in the mornings or get debuff to their mood from being sore, but that’s about it.
When the child is born, however, shit tends to hit the fan. In the Baby stage, Sims cry whenever their needs are low. They might be hungry or need someone to spend time with them or need a diaper changed. Once they hit the Toddler stage, it gets worse. Toddlers throw tantrums and make messes, and also have to be taught to talk, walk, and use the potty. While Young Adult and Adult Sims are able to make enough money to hire a babysitter on occasion, Teen Sims can only get lower paying part time jobs, and also have to balance going to school and doing homework on top of raising a child. Teen Sims also go through phases where they’re extra-sad or extra-angry, creating an additional hurdle to jump when you’re raising a kid.
Some players like the extra challenge of playing with restrictions in place. It’s why players do things like the 100 Baby Challenge or Legacy runs, where you play one family for 10 generations. Others just like the drama that this kind of situation creates. When your Sim is constantly tired, hungry and dirty, it can create for some unexpected social interactions. Some Simmers make YouTube series about these kinds of characters, and they’re among the most popular kinds of series you can make.
Pregnant teen stories have been very popular among The Sims 4 YouTube community, as the options for drama are almost infinite. When you search “teen pregnancy” on YouTube, one of the autocomplete options is “Sims 4,” and from there you’ll find videos about pregnant teen Sims that have been viewed over a million times. One series from the YouTuber ForeignSimmer has a disclaimer saying that she’s not trying to influence people and that this series is “for entertainment purposes only.”
Players have been modding their games to allow for teen pregnancy since The Sims 2, though making videos about them wasn’t as easy in 2004. The combination of popular YouTube series about teen pregnancy and the ease of downloading Sims from the gallery has brought the phenomenon to a peak.
Some players embrace the challenge of playing with a pregnant teen Sim, or want to watch other players struggle through it. It’s simply a source of entertainment to them. Others seem disturbed by how frequently pregnant teen Sims show up in the gallery.. Over on The Sims’s subreddit, one player said, “Look, I get that it can be fun to try a teenage mom without cheats as money would be kinda hard. But it’s so weird how there’s so much of it.” Other players agreed, one saying, “Oh god, everywhere I look it’s pregnant teens!”