Guest Post: Tell Me Again
Sonja Klug on what family storytelling can provide for donor conception families
Editor’s Note: This guest post makes the case for why the donor conception conversation is less a talk to get through and more a story to keep building. The research she draws on - particularly the elaborative reminiscing work of Robyn Fivush - points toward something specific and learnable for parents. If you want to go deeper on what that looks like in practice for donor conception families, check out my companion post on how to use elaborative reminiscing for talking to your child about your family story.
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The Science of Family Storytelling and What It Means for Families Through Donor Conception
Two questions come up again and again when people consider donor conception. Firstly: “Will my child reject me because I’m not their genetic parent?” And secondly: “How on earth will I talk to my child about donor conception?”
I’m Sonja, the founder of Storydo, a platform that helps parents tell their family stories to their children. It’s for all family storytelling, and donor conception origin stories are one variety of story Storydo has been designed to tell. Building the Storydo BookBuilder took me deep into family storytelling research. I also worked closely with child psychologists, social workers, and child development experts to determine how best to facilitate family storytelling through bespoke books.
We’ve now made hundreds of books, and I’m more convinced than ever that the sometimes dreaded ‘talk’ is an opportunity to bring families closer. Family storytelling helps parents build close, resilient families and can help ease fears of rejection.
The Research on Family Storytelling
Robyn Fivush, Professor of Psychology at Emory University, has spent over three decades studying family storytelling and its impact on children’s development. Her research focuses on a style of parent-child conversation about past shared events called elaborative reminiscing, which is characterised by open-ended questions, rich detail, emotional content, and a focus on following the child’s lead.
For example, instead of just asking “Do you remember when we went to the zoo?” and waiting for a yes or no, an elaborative parent builds the story out loud with the child, asking open questions like “What animals did you see?” and “How did you feel when the lion roared?”, filling in details when the child gets stuck, and responding warmly to whatever the child contributes.
The research behind this style of conversation is substantial. A 2006 review by Fivush et al. found that parents regularly talking with their young children about shared experiences in rich, open, collaborative ways is associated with positive outcomes for children. There’s a clear relationship between maternal elaborative reminiscing and benefits for children’s memory, language, and literacy development. There’s also evidence for a link between elaborative reminiscing about emotions and coherence of children’s self-concept.
A narrative literature review by Elias and Brown (2022) adds to this picture, showing that knowing one’s family history is consistently linked to better mental health outcomes in adolescents, such as lower anxiety, higher self-esteem, greater sense of control, and fewer behavioural problems. And it’s not just about knowing the facts. Fivush et al. (2011) found that adolescents who told richer intergenerational narratives - ones that included perspective-taking, emotional content, and explicit connections between their parents’ past experiences and their own lives - tended to have higher wellbeing overall.
You might wonder, though, whether it’s only the positive stories that do this work. Marin et al. (2008) examined whether sharing negative emotions with children could be harmful. They asked middle-class two-parent families to tell stories about a recent negative experience, like the death of a family member or pet, a child’s illness or injury, or an accident or disaster. Interestingly, families that named and explained specific negative emotions (”we were scared,” “it was so sad when Grandma died”) in a collaborative way, building on each other’s feelings rather than arguing or dismissing them, were more likely to have children who reported higher social and academic competence two years later.
The Role of Storytelling in Donor Conception
A parent’s journey to having a family is, of course, a fundamental part of family storytelling. How does this look in practice? In my experience from working closely with families through donor conception, most parents focus on the happy emotions when talking about donor conception to their young children. Most tell their toddlers and preschoolers how much they wanted a baby, about the people who helped them make it happen, about how grateful they are, and how overjoyed they were at the birth of their much-desired child.
But the truth is, many parents also faced barriers to having a family, like infertility, finding a partner, discrimination, and financial restrictions. In my experience, most parents naturally don’t want to focus too much on their own emotional struggles when explaining donor conception. However, when the children are older and able to understand nuance, the fuller narrative can emerge: the parents’ emotions, how they coped with difficulties, and what it took to build their family. Research on intergenerational family narratives suggests that what matters is not just that children know the facts of their family history, but that those stories are told with emotional honesty, coherence, and a clear sense of meaning, the kind of storytelling that helps children locate themselves within something larger than themselves.
What Donor Conceived People Say Matters About How They Were Told Their Story
Navarro-Marshall (2025) argues that the field has spent too long debating whether and when to tell children about their donor conception origins, and not nearly enough time on how those conversations should happen. She proposes a framework that reframes origin story sharing as a rich, responsive, emotionally open storytelling about their origins, one where parents ask questions, follow the child’s lead, and return to the story over time. This aligns with the elaborative reminiscing style of family storytelling discussed above.
A study by Applegarth et al. (2025) of 422 donor-conceived people also makes clear that how people learn about their conception matters enormously. Among those who found out at 16 or older, about two-thirds were dissatisfied with how they learned. Among accidental discoverers, nearly three-quarters were. The most difficult experiences combined both late and accidental discovery, bringing shock, confusion, sadness, and feelings of betrayal. What donor-conceived people in this study consistently valued was being told directly by a parent.
Parents can take real comfort from this. Whatever challenges may come, what matters might not be the story itself, but how, when, and by whom it’s told.
Family storytelling has benefits for parents, too. It can help address the fear of rejection that many parents carry. It’s been shown that elaborative reminiscing can be learnt, and that it creates closer and more resilient families over time, families where children feel secure, connected, and known.
I think something else can be transmitted via family storytelling. Most people who choose donor conception believe that love, shared history, and showing up for each other day after day, year after year, is what makes a family, not genetics. Stories are one of the most natural ways to communicate this value. You can point to it when you see it: a step-parent and child who are clearly devoted to each other, friends who are family. You can explain what is genetic (eye and hair colour), what is a mix of genes and environment (personality, how tall someone grows), and what is purely about the life you share, such as the fun you have together, the close bond you share, how much you enjoy each other’s company and how much you care about each member of your family, and communicate that this what matters.
For children, elaborative reminiscing means they learn about their beginnings in an open, warm way, where they have space to explore, to question, and make it their own (rather than stumble upon it, or it being shared under pressure). For the parents, it can help to address fear and to build stronger bonds. The child’s conception story is integrated into the whole family story and becomes one part of the many wonderful things that make their family who they are.
Bringing Storytelling Into Everyday Life
Working with families, I see every day that telling the conception story is an opportunity for family storytelling, to build trust and even to show some vulnerability that can bring you closer.
So how best to incorporate family storytelling into family life? There are as many ways as there are families, but one thing that really works for us is letting my children look through my camera roll on my phone. They’ll often pick up my phone, when we’ve got 10 minutes before we have to leave the house, for example, or they ask me to look at photos when we’re on the train or waiting in a queue. They scroll, and stop at photos that catch their attention, remembering the day, asking questions and giving me the opportunity to fill in any details or link to other events and stories.
Family storytelling doesn’t have to be a big deal. The in-between moments, like the queue, a cab ride, the 10-minute wait, are often where meaningful conversations happen.
Sonja Klug is the Founder of Storydo, a UK-based company that helps parents create personalised books to tell their children their family stories, including their donor conception story. For more tips on family storytelling, visit storydo.co.uk/blog.
References
Applegarth, L. D., Kaufman, N. L., Thomas, C., Beroukhim, G., Tsai, S., & Joseph-Sohan, M. (2025). Secrets and lies and donor conceptions: What donor-conceived individuals feel about their disclosure/discovery experience. Human Reproduction. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/deaf215
Elias, A., & Brown, A. D. (2022). The role of intergenerational family stories in mental health and wellbeing. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 927795. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.927795
Fivush, R., Haden, C. A., & Reese, E. (2006). Elaborating on elaborations: Role of maternal reminiscing style in cognitive and socioemotional development. Child Development, 77(6), 1568–1588. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2006.00960.x
Fivush, R., Bohanek, J. G., & Zaman, W. (2011). Personal and intergenerational narratives in relation to adolescents’ well-being. New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development, 2011(131), 45–57. https://doi.org/10.1002/cd.288
Marin, K. A., Bohanek, J. G., & Fivush, R. (2008). Positive effects of talking about the negative: Family narratives of negative experiences and preadolescents’ perceived competence. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 18(3), 573–593. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2008.00572.x
Navarro-Marshall, J. (2025). Beyond the disclosure debate in donor-conception: How do we help families to discuss origin stories with their children? Human Reproduction, 40(3), 405-409. https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/deaf004