Origin Stories in Donor‐Conception: Helping Families to Promote Autobiographical Memories and Identity Development in Their Children

Family therapists, fertility counselors, and professionals working with children and donor-conceived families may benefit from a deeper understanding of their conversational processes of origin storytelling-particularly the less examined question of how to talk about donor conception. Elaborative reminiscing (Fivush 2019)-a specific conversational style about the past that supports children in developing autobiographical memories and identity-may be especially relevant in this context. Therefore, this study explores how donor-conceived families talk about origin stories. The sample comprised 45 participants belonging to 17 donor-conceived Chilean families with children aged between 3 and 8, representing heteroparental, homoparental, and monoparental family structures. Parents recorded naturalistic parent-child conversations in their home setting, which were analyzed using an elaborative reminiscing coding scheme. The results show that these conversations were intimate, mother-led, brief, co-constructed, with asymmetrical contributions from parents and children. On average, elaborative turns accounted for 37.5% of the conversation with both parents (43.9%) and children (28.3%) actively contributing. Given children's average age (4.9 years), their degree of elaboration is notable. Three distinct conversational styles emerged: (a) thoughtful and imaginative conversations; (b) narrative conversations with magical elements; and (c) realistic conversations with classic metaphors. These findings suggest that conversational processes may inform the development of interventions aimed at enhancing autobiographical memory and identity development in donor-conceived children.