Talking to young children about using a sperm donor to become a family

Sarah:

Well I think the fear is that your kids are going to decide you’re not their real parents and they don’t love you.  And I think that’s everybody’s root fear and that somehow you’ve done something weird and strange and ruined their life. I think the other fear is the apprehension comes from thinking that you’re going to have to sit down and make a huge deal.  That you’re going to sit them down at some stage and that you’re going to “break the news to them”.  But if you truly believe that what you’ve done is perfectly fine and it’s not bad news it’s just a statement of fact. And if they’ve always known from when they are little you’re not actually breaking the news to them, they’ve just always known. My name’s Sarah.  My partner and I have three children all of whom are conceived using donor sperm.  We have the same donor for all three kids. Well Corin is the oldest... he’s five and a half and he has a pretty clear understanding.  He understands where babies come from.  He has an IVF understanding of where babies come from.  He understands that it was an egg from Emma, which is what he calls me and sperm from Donor Dave which is what he calls our donor.  And that Doctor John put them together and that he grew in my stomach.

Announcer:

Sarah lives in a same sex relationship.  This adds another level of complexity that she believes her children should understand.

Jacqui:

I’m Jacqui, partner of Sarah and Mum to three children, Corin, Scout, Cully - all conceived using the same donor who we refer to as Donor Dave.  And I’m called Mum.

Sarah:

When these issues come up with his friends at school and the parents say, “What should we say when the children ask?”… And I just say that there is so much that you don’t have to explain when they are four.  You just say, “Corin has two mummies and he has a donor.” And if you want to get into that you can.  You don’t actually have to deal with the emotional side because there is no emotional side when you’re four.

Jacqui:

We did a couple of practical things at the time when we initially told Corin how he was conceived and one of them was to use a book that was written specifically for children who were conceived through these means by donors.  And it’s called “My Story” and it’s a great little book illustrated with kids’ drawings and it explains very simply, very basically, the process of being conceived with donor sperm.  And we read it to Corin fairly early on I think. And he probably picked up some of it and understood a little bit.  But we’ve read it to him subsequently as he’s got older. He’s now five and a half and he understands it completely and has done for a while. And even on the occasion when we met our donor we’d been looking at the book prior to his coming and Corin went and got the book and sat with David and went through the story and read it with him.

Announcer:

For many families timing is the problem.  Tell the too young and they won’t understand.  Or wait till they’re older and it could come as a shock.

Sarah:

I think that the earlier you start the better because it just becomes part of their reality.  Corin doesn’t think there is anything strange about his family or the way he was conceived because he doesn’t know any different. So it’s not like he had some idea of what the situation was and that we had to change that.  He has always known.  And I think in some ways it’s much easier to have these conversations early on when their understanding of the world is much more basic. At some stage the kids will actually understand the biology of it all.  We actually, just the other day, Corin asked me where normal babies come from so we had dealt with sex.  And so that is starting to become more of an issue. He talks to his friends at school. For example he’s got friends who have one mum; he’s got a friend who’s got a dad.  So he’s starting to put all that together.  But at some stage we’ll move on to the biology and then I don’t know how interested he’ll be in the genetic side of it.

We’ve met our donor and our donor’s wife and their kids and at some stage he’s going to clue into the fact that our donor’s kids are actually biologically related to him. And I think that’s interesting particularly because he doesn’t have a brother and one of the kids is a boy.  But I don’t know, we’re just completely open to whatever happens and we’ll take it as it comes.  It’s a completely open conversation, we talk about Donor Dave, he knows he’s allowed to tell anybody he wants, and so if it comes up at school he talks about it, he talks about everything.

Jacqui:

But at the same time it has nothing to do with our daily lives or their daily lives so that it’s important in one way but then in a huge way it’s not.  There are a hundred things that are way more important; his friends at school or whether it’s the day he wears his runners because he’s got sport and whether it’s a “Show and Tell” day and all those sorts of things that are starting to involve him now.  So how important is it? I’m not so sure it’s important.

Announcer:

Sarah and Jacqui thought out an interesting way to tell their children and overcome their natural anxieties.

Jacqui:

It’s understandable to be apprehensive, of course it is.  It can be quite a scary and challenging thing but in the end the important thing is tell kids early.  I think that it’s really important, it’s something that they always know.  People I know who have been adopted talk about that, that it was something that they always knew.  It wasn’t an occasion where they got sat down and big sort of formal way and the news was broken to them.  It was something that they always knew.

Sarah:

And you get to practice when they are babies and they don’t understand.  You can say things to Cully and she’s one and she’s not taking it in.  But you’ve actually practised saying it out loud.

Jacqui:

I mean we actually did that, we started saying it out loud to kind of see how it would sound, to see what words we would use. It’s almost like we got a few trial runs at it. We got to experiment, give it a go, before it really begins to sink in.  So that by the time they got to three and a half, four - and that was earlier than we thought - we felt much more confident doing it.  We kind of got over that initial anxiety ourselves. 

Sarah:

So I think the apprehension builds up in the mind of the adult and has very little to do with what’s going on in the mind of the child.

So I think, tell them early, practice, try and get over that anxiety before you do that and - it’s easy to say, but don’t be fearful.  You’re their parents and they love you and you’re still going to be their parents even when you tell them this news.