New families, multiple stories: Conversational processes, origin stories, and donor‐conceived children

Objective How do families with donor‐conceived children talk about their origins with them? Background Donor‐conceived families are challenged to disclose origins to their children. Developmental psychology has scarce evidence about how these conversations unfold. These are discourse‐dependent families; hence, how families talk about these stories is relevant for children's development. Method Naturalistic conversations‐of‐origin stories were analyzed with a structural and pragmatic coding scheme. Participants were 22 mothers, four fathers, 11 daughters, and eight sons (all children aged 3 to 8 years), belonging to 17 donor‐conceived families from heterosexual, lesbian, and single‐mother‐by‐choice structures. All lived in Chile at the moment of research and self‐identified as of Latino ethnicity. Results Origin stories are complex; intimate; mother led; brief in extension; coconstructed, with asymmetrical contribution (parents scaffolding); and interactive. Conclusion These results can contribute to the design of empirically based strategies to support these family conversational processes. Implications or recommendations Further research needs to be done with bigger samples, and follow‐up studies need to be held to assess how these origin stories contribute to identity processes of donor‐conceived children.