Telling your children where they came from

Susan Goldberg, MA Author & Blogger, offers advice for same-sex parents on how to best answer their child's question of where they came from
Telling Children Where They Came From When Using A Sperm Donor
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Telling your children where they came from

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So obviously the standard conversation needs to be tweaked a little bit when you're talking about it with same sex parents. And we chose to just integrate the information into our kids' lives from the get-go as naturally as we could. Our donor was around a lot when our kids were little, and we would just say, oh, here's Rob. He helped us make you. Or he's your dad. We wanted it to be something that they just always knew as opposed to having some big reveal, because it just seemed more natural. There's a great book by Cori Silverberg. It's called What Makes a Baby. It has a really great way of framing it. It talks about 4 things that everybody has in common in the world. And those are sperm, an egg, a womb to grow in, and a home to grow up in. And if you take those 4 things, it's really easy to explain to any kid without getting into a lot of technical details where those things might come from. So this is where your egg came from, here's where your sperm came from, here's where you grew in, and here's the house that you live in now. And here are your moms, and here's your donor dad, or however you choose to frame it .and it works for adoption. It works for any kind of family that there is. And so we used that kind of approach as well and that's worked really well for us.

Susan Goldberg, MA Author & Blogger, offers advice for same-sex parents on how to best answer their child's question of where they came from

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Susan Goldberg, MA

Author & Blogger

Susan Goldberg is a writer, editor, essayist and blogger, and coeditor of the award-winning anthology And Baby Makes More: Known Donors, Queer Parents, and Our Unexpected Families. Her writing has been featured on the CBC and the Globe and Mail, in Ms., Lilith, and Stealing Time magazines, and several anthologies, including the forthcoming Chasing Rainbows: Exploring Gender-Fluid Parenting Practices. Susan is a contributing blogger at Today’sParent.com and VillageQ.com. In 2012, she was chosen as one of BlogHer’s Voices of the Year. She’s currently (always) working on a novel, called Step on a Crack, and on Overflow, a one-woman performance piece about lingerie and breast cancer. Susan lives in Thunder Bay, Ontario, with her partner and their two sons.

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