Using Elaborative Reminiscing for Donor Conception Origin Stories
Robyn Fivush, a psychologist at Emory University, has spent decades studying how families talk about the past and what those conversations do for children. The style she identifies as most beneficial - elaborative reminiscing - is characterized by open-ended questions, emotional content, rich detail, and a consistent focus on following the child's lead. An elaborative parent doesn't ask "do you remember the zoo?" and wait for a yes or no. They build the story out loud together: "What animals did you see?" "How did you feel when the lion roared?" They fill in details when the child gets stuck and respond warmly to whatever the child contributes.
Research on elaborative reminiscing assumes that both the parent and the child were present for the event being discussed: a family vacation, a birthday party, or a family loss. Donor conception is different. The story is about something that happened before the child existed, that the child has no independent memory of, and that may involve people and circumstances they have never encountered.
Because there is no shared memory to revisit, the goal for family building storytelling shifts from “let’s remember this together” to “let’s craft this story together.” Elaborative reminiscing in this space means returning to the story regularly, adding new details as the child grows, answering new questions as they arise, and letting the story evolve as the child’s understanding develops and circumstances change. It means helping the child become the protagonist of the story, not just the recipient.
While elaborative reminiscing was not developed with donor conception in mind, the principles translate, and what follows is one possible way to apply them.
Lay the Foundation
To begin building a story together, your child needs one thing: a foundation of facts you return to and build on as your child grows up.
Every child has questions about where they came from, and every child deserves answers. A child cannot ask questions about a story they don’t know, and they cannot begin to make meaning from information they don’t have. The donor conception facts are part of your child’s origin story, but they are not the whole of it. Grounding them within a broader narrative means your child receives them in the context of everything else that is true about their family and their place in it.
These foundational facts are answers to questions like:
How are babies made?
What kind of help did your family have from donors, surrogates, or doctors?
What do we know about the donor(s)?
Who was excited for you to be born?
What happened when you arrived?
How did people feel when they first met you?
Who loves you and takes care of you every day?
Anchor the Story
Anchors keep a story present and give your child something important: agency. A child who can pick up a photo, open a book, or return to a folder in their own time is a child who owns their story.
Books are one of the most powerful anchors available. Read alongside other beloved stories, they make the origin story ordinary. Let your child choose when to read them. Let them ask questions, or not. Books can do some of the work for you. This includes books others have written or those you make yourself.
Artifacts from the family-building experience, such as a good-luck charm from fertility treatment, a picture from the donor profile (if one exists), a pregnancy announcement photo, or mementos from the birth, kept in an accessible place rather than filed away, create natural openings for conversation without requiring a formal sit-down talk. The child can pick it up. The child can ask questions. You can say, “That’s from when we were hoping you’d come along,” and see where the conversation goes.
A simple folder or box that holds everything you know - the donor profile, any photos, information about donor-linked peers, and whatever else is part of the story - is more than a practical resource. It is a message that says: this is yours, it has always been yours, and it will be here whenever you are ready for it. Let your child know it exists and that they can return to it whenever they want.
Not every family has donor information. Some families have almost nothing. Name the unknown explicitly. “We don’t know what the donor looks like, but here is what we do know” makes the gap present and manageable rather than absent and anxiety-provoking. A placeholder, like a folder with a note that says “this is where we will put things as we find them out”, gives the unknown a home and communicates that new information is welcome when it comes.
Elaborate Over Time
Once your child has the facts and the story has a physical presence in their life, something new becomes possible: you can start building the story together. Remember, elaborative reminiscing is not about having the right answers. It is a way of being in a conversation: curious, responsive, and led by your child. Here is what it could look like in practice:
Ask open questions. Instead of questions that can be answered with a yes or a no, ask questions that open things up. “What do you think about that?” “What do you wonder about?” “What happened next?” Open questions invite your child into the story as an active participant rather than a passive listener.
Expand and add detail. When your child contributes something, build on it. Add the who, what, where, when, and why. If they say, “I wonder what the donor looks like,” you might add what you know or what you wonder too. This is how a bare fact becomes a story, and how a story becomes shared.
Follow their lead. Listen to the question your child is actually asking, not the one you fear they are asking. Follow it with curiosity rather than rushing to respond. Be led by what interests them, what confuses them, what they want to know more about. Your job is not to direct the conversation but to go where they take it.
Validate their perspective. Accept your child’s view of the story, including feelings you find hard to hear. If they are sad, or angry, or curious in ways that feel uncomfortable, resist the urge to correct or reframe. “That makes sense” or “I can understand why you’d feel that way” matters more than setting the record straight. The goal is not accuracy; it is trust.
Encourage and affirm. When your child contributes a question, a memory, a feeling, or an observation, tell them it matters. “That’s a really important question.” “I’m so glad you told me that.” “I hadn’t thought about it that way before.” Positive affirmation is what keeps the conversation open. A child who feels that their contributions are valued will keep contributing. A child who feels managed or corrected might go quiet.
Talk about thoughts and feelings. Stories are not just sequences of events. What makes them meaningful is the inner life they carry, and the inner life that matters most here is your child’s. What do they think about what they’ve heard? How does it feel to know this about themselves? What do they wonder about? Invite your child to name their feelings, and make space for whatever comes up. Specific emotion words - curious, confused, proud, sad, excited, worried, unsure - give children a richer vocabulary to draw on and signal that all feelings about their story are welcome. Parents can share their own emotions too, not to ask the child to carry them, but to model that feelings can be named and survived. “I felt scared because I didn’t know if it would work, and what helped was...” is not a burden; it is an invitation. It shows the child that difficult feelings belong in this conversation, and that they don’t have to protect you from theirs.
A story told once is information; a story told many times becomes part of who you are.
No parent gets this right every time. You will stumble over words, misjudge the moment, or say something you wish you could take back. It is not the perfect telling that matters, but the telling and retelling, the accumulation of conversations over the years that weave a story into the fabric of your family.
The research suggests that children who grow up in families where the past is talked about richly - openly, honestly, and repeatedly - develop better emotional understanding, stronger coping skills, and a more stable and coherent sense of who they are. For donor-conceived children, that could mean something specific: the capacity to hold their own story and make their own meaning from it. They will find their own labels for the relationships in their story. They will decide what meaning and value to place on those connections. They will determine how central their donor conception is to their identity, and what place it holds in the larger picture of who they are.
That is the goal: not a child who has been told their story, but a child who owns it.