How to Care for Babies and Toddlers in Paralives

Paralives has finally arrived in Early Access. While it has a lot of similarities to other life sims that help seasoned players navigate its features, most features aren't in what will be their final state due to the game's Early Access status. The result is that caring for your Paras isn't always as straightforward as you might believe.

Naturally, Paras who are in the baby or toddler life stage are unable to manage their needs without help from older family members. The hard part is that the way you have to interact with the Paras to meet their needs doesn't feel as streamlined as it could, and perhaps should.

Caring for Babies in Paralives

Babies are somewhat more manageable than toddlers. Most of their needs can be addressed straight from clicking on them with an older Para to interact. When you select a baby, you have the following options:

• Pick up
• Bottle Feed (Hunger)
• Cuddle (Love)
• Rock Baby (Love)
• Breastfeed (Hunger)
• Burp Baby
• Play Baby Plane (Love)
• Talk to Baby (Love)

These options let you address almost every need directly except for sleep and hygiene. For sleep, you need to pick up the baby and then interact with a crib, which then gives you the option of placing the baby in the crib. Interacting with the crib without holding a baby doesn't give you any options. Once in the crib, the baby is able to do self-soothing actions like shaking a rattle to get to sleep.

For hygiene, you want to watch the baby for when it uses its diaper, which will then give you the option to change its diaper and raise its hygiene. It's quite obvious when a baby or toddler needs a diaper change, as they have a green cloud around them.

Caring for Toddlers in Paralives

Toddlers have much more self-sufficiency than babies. When you have a toddler selected, you're able to interact with a training potty to handle the bathroom need without help. If you don't get the toddler on the potty, they'll use their diaper, which you then need to change. You can also interact with a toddler's bed to sleep without an adult putting you to bed. The needs that you can't fill alone as a toddler are love, hygiene and hunger.

For love, you need to regularly interact with the toddler like other Paras. Even just talking with the toddler is enough to raise their love need. It's just about spending time with their family.

Hygiene and hunger are a little confusing at first. In the Sims, you can select a high chair or bathtub and have the option at any point to feed or bathe your toddler. In Paralives, you have to first pick up the toddler. Once you're holding the toddler, you can select a high chair and feed them on it to fill their hunger. Similarly, you can select a bathtub, and you'll have the option to bathe your toddler.

As a game in Early Access, I'm not surprised that there are extra steps needed to do some tasks or that glitches appear at random. I hope that upcoming updates will make the options for caring for babies and toddlers more streamlined in Paralives.