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[pisskop]

Chain the childrens up by the enterance!  Its a child market!  Now if only the gobs would pay.

[Patchy]

Children will respect burrows to a degree. I usually burrow mine away in a designated childs room till they grow up.... if I play the fort that long. Put a food and booze stockpile in there, some beds for a dorm, there own legendary dining room, and they are good to go. Just lock the door once you get them all inside.

[Callista]

If modding dorfs is okay for you:

find the [CHILD:12] tag for the dwarves in standart.txt, set a lower number for less time as a child
which means less children arrive at your fortress

If you mod that down to 1, does it make babies grow up to adults, or does it just give you a one-year childhood after a one-year babyhood? What if you take it down to 0; does it eliminate childhood?

Anybody know the answer to this one? Or should I just start a new topic? If not I will have to test it myself.

[guitarxe]

My last fortress was 42% children and babies though lol. I looked up the US resident population by sex and age in the year 2000, and the percentage of humans aged less than 20 in the US was
(19176 + 20550 + 20528 + 20219) / 281425.0
which is 21% 28.5%.

So even counting every human under 20 as a child, that dwarf fortress had, proportionally, twice the way more children.

Pre-modern population distribution was *significantly* different than what we are accustomed to today.  Remember that DF is set pre-1400.  A quick check shows that in the 1910 census, which is still far more modern than medieval, the US population had 32.1% children, defined as age 14 or less; and this doesn't count the still significant mortality rate of the very young.  If I' reading the 1890 tables right, it was 35.5%.  Earlier censuses had less specific questions, but the median age for the entire US (all classes/races/sexes) in 1820 was 16.7 years old; the earliest US census data (white males only for 1790) show a median age of 15.9 years.  (By comparison, the 2010 US median age across all groups was 37.2; a mere 220 years back drops the median age by well over half, and DF is intended to be set the equivalent of over 600 years back.) 

Picking a semi-random well documented case, King Edward I (1239-1307)... had at least 14 and perhaps 16 children by his first wife, of which only 6 survived to adulthood.  When his first wife died and he took a second, he had 3 more total, 2 of which made it to adulthood.  Note that this was a family that was, in general, well-supplied with all its physical needs; yet less than half of them made it to adulthood. 

Population growth requires, in the most general terms, that a couple have an average of more than two children that survive to adulthood and bear children of their own.  Given that not all adults are able to have children (become priests, die in accident or combat before having children, many other reasons), you need noticeably more than 2.0 surviving adult children per couple; given child mortality rates well over 50% in many cases, a couple having 5-6 kids was quite common, and 8+ kids wasn't significantly unusual in many places. 

tl;dr: DF is attempting to simulate a pre-1400 medieval population.  A substantial fraction of your population *should* be children for a vital and thriving fort; if you don't like that, feel free to mod it to something more to your liking, but be aware that you're getting into the category of mods that make the game easier by making it less realistic to your personal taste.

By default I think dwarves are set to grow to adults in 12 years? I've never had a fort last that long and I think for most people that's true, too.
The problem is, like you say back then it's true there were a lot more children in the population compared to now, but back then children had to work, too. They couldn't just drink booze and slack off the way they do in DF.
Sure they couldn't become professional craftsmen or something, but they could still help out. I know DF does this to some extent by assigning children to hauling and constructing and deconstructing, but I think there's a lot more that they should be able to do.

[Kipi]

I have noticed that the length of history does affect a bit to child migration. If you have longer history then more children has been born. Now, since it's quite common that one pair of adult may have even six children, this means that there are usually more children around than adults, which means higher probability of child to arrive.

Now, I tend to use history length of 100 years when I generate a world. I hardly ever get children migrants, and I think I know the reason; The first dwarves have already managed to breed as much as they will (4-8 children). These children have usually managed to reach the adulthood and breed as well. Now, the third generation, is very often born around 20-30 years before the embark. What this means is that, while they have already reached the adulthood, they usually don't have children themselves yet! Few exception exists but those are relatively rare.

How I have noticed this? Usually the relations of each dwarf (yes, I check those more or less always) contain one generation up and/or one generation down (parents and children) but rarely grandparents or grandchildren. What this means is that the migrants are almost always from the first or second generation, and in few cases third generation. And even those who are third generation have already reached the adulthood.

So, unless you have very specific reason to have a longer history, I suggest using something like 100 years.

[aoxoa]

Well dwarf therapist has a *cough* feature that lets kids (not toddlers/babies) be able to work just like adults. Its a cheat of coarse lol. But if their that annoying, you can force them to work just like adults. They should be doing work anyway, their hardened dwarf children.

[pisskop]

Well dwarf therapist has a *cough* feature that lets kids (not toddlers/babies) be able to work just like adults. Its a cheat of coarse lol. But if their that annoying, you can force them to work just like adults. They should be doing work anyway, their hardened dwarf children.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is what childrens should be doing, not playing meatshied w/mommy.  It needs to happen with dwarfs.

Why does this *not* happen with dwarves?