As always a well formulated idea @voxel_pirate.
For me if I was playing and the game had this sort of “life” progression … the way you play, the things you have in your settlement, and the direction you guide the children in, should directly result in their skills, traits, and personality; something that has been mentioned above.
The worry is that something like this could be a hell of a time sink for rather sparse short term benefits. And when you’re first starting out it could be a tricky thing to manage.
Having said that it would be an extremely interesting thing to have, and like you said, similar to the farming etc, would be a great aspect of the game that if you wished to focus your attentions on, could reap some fantastic benefits.
If you were to shorten the growth period of child → worker then the results of that could be, reduced capability, start at lower skill level, take longer to level up for a certain amount of time, work slower? All these sorts of things.
I would probably say the major reason is ‘what does it add to gameplay?’ Sure there’s violence and how would you work that against children, and perhaps Stonehearth isn’t the game to tread ground on that issue, but purely from a gameplay perspective how do you work it in?
You’re essentially having a portion of your population rendered useless for a specific amount of time. Yes they can buff certain things but that isn’t in anyway a replacement of a working unit.