There are several things that I do that help me produce esteemed elders (includes spoilers):
The first of which is using stews when the villagers are children. I feed the children the exercise stew (Red Red Red) and it makes them perform one of three exercise routines. They take off running from the cauldron in one of three directions: upper left, upper right, lower right. They tend to get stuck in upper left and lower right once additional huts have been built, so if you see them take off in any direction except upper right drag them back to the stew to eat and try again. If they take the route to the upper right, they will run to the rocks to the right of the blue flower and lift them. They will then do 'sit-ups' and after that they will either get an increase in building or shake their heads and say "no." They get a skill increase roughly 1/3 of the time. It takes a lot of persistent effort to keep dragging them back, but you can easily get a 4 year old with 40% of his build skill bar already colored in. The other way that I train kids is to make them eat a sickening stew (Black Black Red) and then drag the other healthy children to heal them. The reason I do this with children is because it keeps the adults happily working and you can round up all of the kids by dragging an adept/master parent onto a child. They will all line up in neat rows near the stew. A trainee parent will tell stories and that will not cause as many children to come running as the adept parent parent will.
About the parenting skill:
At first I found it a lot easier to make men esteemed eldersthan women because I would make them build, then farm, and then, when they were too old and slow to move around, research. Unfortunately, this meant that if I wanted a woman to become an elder with these three skills, she would have to have very few children, otherwise she would start moving very slowly before she finished mastering her farming or building skills. The solution to the problem I found was this: train the female villager as a child in building by feeding her the stew. Then at 14 start her on construction. Once she masters the building skill, drag her onto children to tell stories. This will boost her parenting bar up to 40% if you're persistent, which is the equivalent skill gain of having approximately 5 kids. Then start breeding her to masters; that way her children may be born a potential increase in those skills. If a female villager can no longer birth children but is still not a master in parenting, use the "Mrs. Robinson Method." Drag the now post-menopausal villager repeatedly onto a young 'stud.' The couple does not even need to go into the breeding hut, just drag the female villager onto the male over and over again in the same spot. After dropping her about 500 times or roughly 9 minutes of dropping her once every second, a villager at about the 50% mark will have mastered the skill of parenting. She is then free to work as a scientist and become an esteemed elder in that fashion. It is also possible to train a female in 2 skills such as building and science before using "The Mrs. Robinson Method" to make her a master of parenting.
Hope that this helps! I know that it sounds pretty weird... but it works!
I have a beloved woman now over 50 who only birthed one child 
And I'm really particular with the "stud" method. I tend to only do so with the ones who were paired together before because they tend to take better instead of constantly running away. And unfortunately, her man was about 10 years older and died before I purchased Med Tech Level 2. 
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