Parent and child experiences talking about donor conception
Talking about donor-conception: Parents’ and children’s experiences of origin storytelling. (Navarro, 2025)
Navarro-Marshall, J. (2025). Talking about donor-conception: Parents’ and children’s experiences of origin storytelling. Infant and Child Development, 34, e70028. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.70028
Geographic Region: Chile
Research Question: How do families with donor-conceived children talk about their origins with them and how to parents and children experience this storytelling?
Design: Descriptive exploratory qualitative study using a naturalistic approach. The researcher asked families to record origin-story conversations with their children in their own homes, without the researcher present, at a time of the family’s choosing. Parents then conducted brief semi-structured interviews with their children immediately after the origin conversation, asking five questions about the child’s emotional experience and favorite/least favorite parts of the story. The researcher next conducted semi-structured interviews with parents exploring context (who tells, when, frequency, terminology), their emotional experience of telling the story, and reflection on the recorded conversation through audio feedback. Data collection occurred between late 2024 and early 2025.
Sample: 45 individuals from 17 families participated, including 19 donor-conceived children (11 female; 8 male) ranging in age from 3 to 8 years (mean age 4.9 years). Caregiver mean age was 41.4 years. Family structures included 5 heterosexual couples, 6 female same-sex couples, and 6 single mothers by choice. Most families (12) used sperm donation, 3 used egg donation, and 2 used double donation through fertility clinics with cryobanks located in the USA, Spain, or Chile. Younger parents and children tended to be in lesbian families; older children were in heterosexual families; older parents were single mothers by choice. All parents held college degrees. All participants were living in Chile at the time of the study and self-identified as Latino/a. All families had already disclosed donor conception or were certain they intended to do so. Donor type varied: some families used identity-release donors (contact information available to the child at age 18), some used anonymous donors (no identifying information ever available), and one family used an informal sperm donor contacted through social media. Recruitment used three channels: social media advertisements, community organizations serving single mothers by choice and lesbian families, and fertility clinic counselors.
Editor’s Note: The numbers in this study are used to describe patterns, not to make statistical claims.
Key Findings
Parents arrived at storytelling with varying degrees of openness: 8 families were completely convinced from the beginning about transparency (particularly same- sex families, where 5 of 6 expressed this position), while 6 families decided to be open primarily to avoid potential harm from secrets or because they felt technology would reveal the truth anyway.
Parents universally struggled more with when and how to tell rather than whether to tell, addressing doubts by imitating others, seeking advice from people with similar situations like adoption, or waiting for children’s questions. 7 families could not identify a specific moment when they began telling, reporting it emerged spontaneously and had “always” been discussed, even before birth. Seven families said participating in the research provided deadlines and structure that helped them formulate their stories.
All families described stories evolving over time, starting with simple elements like “seeds” and progressively adding concepts like eggs, donors, and family diversity, with children asking more questions as they matured.
Parents expressed diverse emotions about telling: 4 families reported positive feelings like happiness and relief, 4 reported difficult feelings like sadness, fear, and anxiety, with some describing emotions that evolved as the story developed over time. 13 families made positive evaluations of their conversations, valuing spontaneity (3 families), children’s higher-than-expected contributions (4 families), and strengthened emotional bonds and trust (4 families). 8 mothers offered self-critical assessments after listening to recordings, feeling their stories were not fluid, forced, or contained too much information.
When parents conducted brief interviews with their children immediately after origin conversations, 9 of 14 children expressed positive emotions about their origin stories, though some responses were ambiguous (such as being “not bothered” rather than enthusiastic). Children’s favorite story elements mirrored general birth narratives (e.g., being born, the tummy, and having their mothers) rather than donor conception specific details. Parents’ perspectives largely aligned with this positive interpretation, with 10 families describing children’s reactions as happiness, tranquility, or security, while 7 families perceived neutral reactions, attributing this to children being too young to fully question their stories or getting caught up in irrelevant details. Donor conception specific concerns emerged primarily in older children, with three expressing discomfort: two older children (ages 7-8) disliked the donor despite never meeting him, and one child expressed sadness about not having a father and feeling lonely.
Young donor-conceived children were already engaged in identity work, or processing their origin stories and translating feelings into words. Rather than passively receiving information, children actively use narratives to construct their understanding of who they are over time. This demonstrates that origin storytelling is not just about conveying facts, but can serve as a developmental tool that helps children build coherent self-narratives that integrate their unique conception into their emerging identity.
Limitations: The study involved a relatively small sample of 17 families, which limits the breadth of findings. Father participation was limited, with only 4 fathers compared to 22 mothers, making the results predominantly mother-centered and potentially missing important paternal perspectives on origin storytelling, particularly given that the two fathers who did participate showed more ambivalence about disclosure than mothers. The children recruited were younger than originally planned, which meant the study could not fully capture the evolving complexities of origin conversations at ages 10 and older when identity work intensifies during adolescence. Children’s responses may reflect social desirability bias, as parents conducted the child interviews, potentially making children “guardians of their caregivers’ feelings” rather than expressing authentic reactions.
Applications: Parents might recognize that uncertainty about when and how to tell origin stories is universal, even among families committed to openness. Rather than seeking a perfect moment or script, origin storytelling can be evolving process that begins simply and becomes more detailed as children develop cognitively and emotionally. Fertility counseling could address the “when” and “how” of disclosure, not just the “whether,” since all families in this study were committed to telling but struggled with implementation. Counselors could normalize parental anxiety about disclosure while providing concrete strategies for storytelling.
Funding Source: Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chilean National Agency for Research and Development), grant number 21190581.
Lead Author: Javiera Navarro-Marshall is a Chilean psychologist and academic at the Facultad de Psicología, Universidad Alberto Hurtado in Santiago, Chile. Her research focuses on parent-child communication, autobiographical memory, and donor-conceived family storytelling. She is a parent through donor conception.
Regulatory Context:
Chile has no comprehensive legislation governing assisted reproductive technology or donor conception. ART practices are regulated by the ethics committees of individual medical centers, not by national law. Most clinics voluntarily adhere to standards set by the Latin American Network of Assisted Reproduction (REDLARA).
The only relevant national legal provision is an article of Chile’s Civil Code stipulating that the father and mother are presumed to be the persons who voluntarily used ART, meaning legal parentage follows intent, not genetics. In the absence of marriage, paternity must be voluntarily acknowledged.
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