I'm feeling pretty confused since I noticed just know while working on one of my mods that children and teens are supposed to have childhood phases (with the Parenthood pack). I'm pretty sure I never ever experienced that in gameplay... Does this work for anyone else?

I do not even see the "Entering a phase" interaction on a child (even after disabling all mods).

I even looked into the game code and it seems there's a commodity tied to the child/teen buff. I'm not that familiar with commodity tuning and am now wondering if this is a short lifespan problem... But at least the user directed phase entering should work, shouldn't it?

To answer my own question: yes, it's broken and yes, it's related to short life span.

When a child or teen gets instantiated directly (if you create a household) the commodity is added with a random value between 3 and 7 days. After that time there's a 3:1 chance that the child or teen enters a phase.

When you age up a Sim to a child or teen this statistic always gets set to its maximum value (7 days), which is pretty useless on short lifespan, so children and teens on short lifespan will never enter a phase...

And there's even another bug where the commodity/timer is not correctly reset if no phase is entered (25% chance).

Ugh... I'm a little angry right now... When a feature is so broken, that I don't even know that it exists at all and only learn about it while making mods... At least it's not difficult to fix.