Written by: Julia Gytri
There’s a moment most donor-conceived parents quietly practice over and over in their heads, sometimes for years before it happens. Your child struggles with the unknowns of the missing branches of an entire side of their family tree in that project for school. Your teenager looks up from the Punnett squares in their AP bio homework, wondering just how recessive some of their traits really are. Your young adult unwraps a 23andMe kit, not-so-subtly trying to find answers to the question they realize they’ve been asking their whole life: “Where does the rest of me come from?”
For decades, the dominant guidance was to keep the answer simple, private, or postponed. Today, we know better. That guidance has caught up with biology. Between consumer DNA tests, social-media-mediated reunions, and a generation of donor-conceived adults speaking openly about their experiences, the question is often no longer if a donor-conceived child will encounter their origins. It’s likely when and how prepared their family will be when they do.
This article is for the parents who have been practicing their story all along, the parents who would rather meet the moment from a place of preparation rather than panic.
When egg donation programs began in the 1980s, “anonymous” carried weight. Anonymity was much easier to guarantee in a society without advanced DNA, databases and interconnectivity, and the constant communication of high-speed internet. Identifying information stayed tucked away on a paper in a filing cabinet. Contact between a donor and family was logistically improbable.
That world is gone.
Direct-to-consumer DNA testing has put more than 40 million people into searchable genetic databases worldwide, and the math of that is unambiguous: a donor-conceived person who chooses to look (or who simply takes a kit at a family gathering) can identify a biological parent and half-siblings without the donor or the parent ever opting in. Researchers in genetic genealogy have demonstrated that even when neither party tests, a third or fourth cousin’s results can be enough to triangulate identity.
The American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s Ethics Committee has acknowledged this directly in recent opinions. So have donor-conceived advocacy organizations like the U.S. Donor Conceived Council and the Donor Sibling Registry, founded in 2000 and now connecting more than 90,000 members across donor-conceived families and donors.
Lisa Schuman, LCSW, who has counseled donor-conception families for nearly three decades, frames it bluntly: anonymity is not a feature of modern donor conception. It’s a memory of one.
That isn’t necessarily a problem for families. It’s simply a planning fact, and the families who treat it that way tend to do well
The nervousness beneath children wanting to establish contact with their donor is rarely about the donor at all. It’s about the parent(s). They often ask themselves a question they know, at face value, is not a rational one, but still is a deeply emotional (and totally normal) knee-jerk reaction: “If they want to know where they came from, does it mean I’m not enough?”
The research and clinical experience answer the same way: No.
Identity development in childhood is a process of building a coherent story. Children who were adopted, donor-conceived, or born through any non-traditional path consistently demonstrate the same pattern. Wanting more information about their origins is a developmental signal of secure identity formation, not a wound in the parent-child bond. Long-running work from the Cambridge Centre for Family Research and others has shown that children of donor conception, when raised in openly disclosing families, consistently report normal levels of well-being and strong relationships with the parents who raised them.
Schuman has put it this way in her writing for parents: in nearly thirty years of clinical work, she has never seen a child’s curiosity about a donor displace love for the parents who showed up. Curiosity isn’t a vote against you. It’s a vote for their own wholeness, for themselves.
When parents brace for “the question,” they often imagine one big conversation. In reality, donor curiosity tends to arrive in three distinct flavors, often at three different ages:
1. Medical questions are usually the first to come up, usually in the most ordinary settings. Filling out a pediatrician’s intake form, a puberty conversation, a school health unit, or later, a pregnancy of their own. The question can sound like,“Do I have a family history of X?,” and if you’re not properly thinking about it, can catch you off guard. This curiosity is concrete and pragmatic. It’s also often the easiest to address because modern egg banks now hold expansive donor medical histories that families can reference. These conversations can end with the facts, or expand as necessary based on how your child’s curiosity guides the conversation.
2. Thoughts around identity tend to surface in middle childhood and early adolescence.
“Do I look like her?”
“Was she good at music, too?”
“What’s she like now?”
This is the curiosity that’s most easily mistaken for rejection by a parent who’s still working through their own genetic loss, and the one that responds to a calm, prepared parent who can answer the question without flinching.
3. Connection curiosity is perhaps the most complex of all of these. These are the questions that arise around the possibility of meeting their donor, or the existence of half-siblings… the questions whose answers have the power to take what was once a more abstract idea and turn it into a full, tangible reality. Connection curiosity usually emerges in the teen years or in early adulthood, especially in the wake of a DNA test, and benefits most from advance preparation, because it’s the one most likely to involve real-world contact, real-world boundaries, and real-world emotions in motion.
Knowing which kind of curiosity you may be facing in any given moment is one of the most useful skills a parent of a donor-conceived child can develop. A medical question doesn’t always need an existential answer. An identity question doesn’talways need a phone number. There’s no rulebook for how to respond to every question, but knowing how you feel about them in advance will help set you up for success.
When a question lands, the single most important thing a parent can do is not make it bigger than the child has.
(This is actually a decent rule of thumb for a lot of big questions your kid may ask you, regardless of whether or not it has to do with such a loaded topic!)
For example, a four-year-old asking, “Did I grow in your tummy?” is asking for a story arc with a beginning, middle, and end, not a detailed clinical dissertation on their entire birth. A nine-year-old wondering where their egg came from is testing whether this is a topic they’re allowed to be curious about with you, which actually means your facial reaction may matter more than your response. A teenager asking if they are allowed to go looking for their donor? They might be telling you that they already have (or are about to).
There are a few language anchors that tend to serve families well across ages:
1. Like any communication with your child, you’ll be most successful if you aim to match their developmental stage, not your anxiety. Toddlers and young children don’t need accurate vocabulary. They need familiarity. Schuman tells the story of one child who heard “donor” for years, but heard it as the word “donut.” Once clarified, that child grew up continuing to discuss donor conception without any shame because the word had always been part of the household… even if it hadn’t always been completely comprehended.
2. Use plain, true language.
“A kind person helped us by giving the egg you grew from.”
“Your dad and I needed help having a baby, and someone helped us.”
Allow specifics to expand as your child’s ability to understand does. There’s no need to rush.
3. Affirm the question itself.
“I’m so glad you asked me.”
“This is something we can always talk about.”
Frankly, the signal that this topic is welcome and creates no negative air matters more than any single answer.
4. To that effect, avoid language that closes the door, even if it feels positive in the moment.
“It’s not important.”
“We’re your real parents.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
Even when said with love and good intentions, these sentiments signal that the topic is unsafe, and a child who feels their curiosity is unwelcome in their home is more likely to pursue it alone (and likely, in the wild west of the onlineworld, where you will have very little oversight).
5. Remember that it’s okay not to know.
“That’s a great question. I don’t have the full answer, but let’s try to find out together.” This is often a more trust-building response than a tidy one, and will obviously require some work on your part. But in the end, working alongside your child to help answer their questions in real-time could potentially be a meaningful experience for both of you.
Remember: A small, calm answer at age six is the foundation of a real, rational conversation at sixteen.
One of the most useful frames Schuman gives parents is the distinction between privacy and secrecy.
Privacy is your family’s reasonable right to choose who outside the household knows your conception story. Your dentist doesn’t need it. Your in-laws’ book club doesn’t need it. Your child’s third-grade teacher doesn’t need it unless your family chooses to share. That’s healthy.
Secrecy is something different, and it can often take the form of information withheld from the donor-conceived person themselves. The research on outcomes is consistent: late or accidental discovery (a relative’s slip, a 23andMe surprise, a clerical discovery) is one of the most reliably difficult experiences for donor-conceived people, while early, age-appropriate, ongoing disclosure inside the family is associated with healthy adjustment.
The boundary your child needs is not a gate around their story. It’s a door that opens and closes firmly around your family’s choice of who outside the family is told, with the child fully inside, behind the door from the beginning. Privacy with the world. Openness with your kid.
The parents who navigate donor curiosity well are almost never the ones who never felt anything about it. They’re the ones who overcame the hard feelings first (and didn’t outsource them to their child).
A few things that consistently help:
For some donor-conceived people, curiosity stays in the realm of knowing more. For others, it moves toward contact. Both are normal. Either way, the anticipation of the future conversation is, almost always, much larger than the conversation turns out to be.
When a child or young adult signals that they would like to look, the most supportive thing a parent can offer is presence, not steering. In this case, it’s important to:
The job here is not to try to manage the outcome. It’s to make sure your child knows you are walking next to them, always.
The egg banks operating with integrity in 2026 are not pretending it’s still 1995.
Today’s donors are screened with the assumption that contact may someday happen. They’re counseled about the realities of consumer DNA testing before they ever donate. They’re invited into open-ID programs. Their medical histories are designed to be updatable, not archival. Donor-sibling networks are recognized as a real and lasting feature of the families being built.
Families considering donor eggs today deserve clear-eyed information from the institutions facilitating their family-building, not nostalgia for a model of anonymity that the science has already rendered obsolete. (For more on the difference between privacy and secrecy in your family’s story, see our companion piece, Privacy vs. Secrecy in Donor Conception. For the parents working through the emotional layer of donor conception itself, Genetic Grief Isn’t Linear is written for you.)
The families who do this well are the ones who decide, early, that surprise is the enemy and familiarity is the friend.
Your child’s curiosity is not a crisis. It’s a milestone. A prepared parent can meet with the same warmth they brought to first words, first days of school, first heartbreaks. You will not get every sentence right. And your child will not need you to. What they will need is a parent whose face doesn’t change when the topic comes up, a parent who is simply unconditionally there to meet their questions with love and support.
If you’d like deeper, expert-led support on disclosure, age-appropriate conversation frameworks, and the emotional work of donor-conception parenting, we point families to Lisa Schuman’s Building Your Family Community courses, peer groups, and resources from the clinician whose work informed much of this guide.
You’re not preparing your child for a hard conversation. You’re raising a person who will never remember not knowing their story.
Fairfax EggBank partners with more than 450 fertility clinics nationwide and offers one of the largest, most diverse pools of rigorously screened, FDA-compliant frozen donor eggs in the United States. Our purpose is a world where there are no barriers to having a family — and where every family that builds with us is supported beyond the transfer.
Expert insight in this article paraphrased with permission from the published work of Lisa Schuman, LCSW — psychotherapist, author of Building Your Family: The Complete Guide to Donor Conception, and founder of The Center for Family Building.
Julia Gytri is a multidisciplinary writer and healthcare advocate bridging the arts and public health through a hybrid career rooted in education, communications, and collaboration. Her mission is to improve the standard of care for those living with rare, stigmatized, and/or under-researched conditions through storytelling in every project she undertakes.
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