It would be neat to get some backstory for your characters by looking into their childhoods. Stories taking place in the future would also be neat.

Sounds interesting, though adding specific dates can be tricky depending on what kind of story you're telling. If your characters are supposed to be in a setting in a specific time period ie the 90s or 2000s etc, then exact dates would make sense. For the kind of comics I'm doing, my characters don't age so I'd avoid giving exact birth years or dates of important events. However they'd still be aware of the passage of time, which is why I have a kid character of mine comment that she hasn't grown up since 1999. https://www.furaffinity.net/view/57789060/

It'd be interesting to set these characters within certain time periods, however I don't know if that would limit things too much for you if you gotta closely abide by the laws of time.

If you're thinking to do an ongoing narrative, a timeline comes in real handy to help glue everything together.

But if it's loose one-off adventures set in different varying time periods, maybe setting a specific birthyear for each character could make it limiting. It's why certain franchises tend to avoid addressing specific dates.

That's my input though ^^

It's not that I want an ongoing narrative. It's more that I want to tell stories at different points in their lives.

Well then, setting specific birth dates depends on whether you want to have them in a certain time period. They gonna be 80s kids? 90s kids? 2000s?

You'll still create a timeline when doing this, basically, even if the stories are loose. It ain't a bad thing of course, I'm just curious on how you'd go about it, given it's admittedly a rarity in most stories.

Time period isn't all that important to me. I just want to be able to show when the story is happening in a natural way

Alright, then by all means, go nuts :p

I think it would flesh them out a tad more, and develop them. Something I should probably do with my own (many MANY) OCs, tbh.