Contrary to the info on this page, ensuring that a 3-7 yo child reach growth tier 8 is actually HARD. I've tried raising several children from 3 to 7 year old in a hand-off way, but all of them only reach tier 5-6 despite all learning means being available: outside, book, comms console, and school. They simply don't start any learning activity while their learning need drop below 80%, or even 70%.
I decided to investigate using devmode. I dropped my child's learning need to 0 while filling their food and sleep needs. Then I gave them a specific desire using "Add learning desire", and find out what are the requirements for each learning activity to start. Here is what I found:
- Lesson taking requires an awake adult that is capable of teaching. If no adult can do childcare, or the capable ones are sleeping, the child will never go to the desk.
- Work watching requires an adult currently using a skill the child is capable of. For children age 3-7, I found only recruiting and enslaving prisoners allow for them to work-watch. They will not watch adults hunting, feeding prisoners, or doing any skilled labor.
- Skydreaming has a rather mysterious requirement to activate, but children seem to start this activity when they are near the outside of any room or animal pens (but deconstructing a few wall or fence block to break the enclosure doesn't make the children start skydreaming). Children can do skydreaming when it's raining.
- Nature running: I have no idea how to ensure that children start this activity when their need is below 90%.
When you must ensure an average learning satisfaction of 90%, there is very little room for error, that means waking the child up when they're sleeping and their learning drop below 90%, waking an adult up whenever the child need to take lessons, and drafting and moving the child outside when they need to sky dream.