Customer Reviews

Let Me Explain: A Story about Donor Insemination

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book is great for a school-aged girl who has been conceived through DI, is being raised by a mom and a dad, with the dad being the best father in the world.

I found this book to be lacking in general, nuts and bolts, child friendly information about DI. There is a little in there, but the majority of the book is devoted to discussing the relationships between the girl and her parents.

As a children's book, it is very wordy and the illustrations leave much to be desired. It is clearly directed toward children who are at least 7 or older.

As the single mother of a bright, question asking 3 year-old who was conceived through DI, I am beyond feeling dissappointed with this book. I actually feel it would do our family more harm than good. My guess is that most same-sex parents of children conceived through DI will share my opinion.

A child's DI origins may be difficult for a parent to discuss. How do you bring it up? What do you tell them? Well, this book will definately help! It is written as a story that you can read to your child at a young age. A must for any parent of a DI child.

While I agree with others that this book is wordy (23 pages of story and pictures) and has a lot of feel-good text about Daddy (not necessarily a bad thing, though perhaps overkill), it did exactly what I wanted it to in our family. It does not have a lot of detail about DI, but it opened up the door to conversation. The story features a little girl conceived by DI telling about her daddy in loving terms. She talks about their relationship and how dad is always there for her: "When I was little, Dad always held my hand tightly while we crossed the street." She talks about genes "and I don't mean the blue jeans that people like to wear," and then about sperm and ova. She uses the analogy of her broken bike chain to describe how they tried to fix the chain and couldn't figure out what was wrong with it so they had to get a new one, just as mommy and daddy went to the doctor about why the sperm couldn't make a baby and had to get sperm from a donor. She explains that she doesn't know a lot about the donor and will probably never meet him. She ends with the message that the sperm came from someone else, but she has only one dad.

This book lacks what the majority of people who concieve thru DI need. General terms and an outline of various DI scenarios.
Straight couples are the lowest percentage of people who use DI to conceive. MOST women using DI are Lesbians and/or single straight women.

While there are straight couples who use DI when there is male-factor infertility, I feel that this book lacks the insight needed for this subject. It is useless for anyone except straight couples. Single women and lesbian couples cannot use this book, in fact, it would serve to alienate their child if it is read to them.

As a woman who conceived a child thru DI, i know first hand that when you are someone looking to address the topic in a children's book, there is more responsibility and more thoughtfulness that must go into the writing. As a result of the lack of insight of the author, I can only assume that book sales for this title were very limited. Now, when someone writes about this in the future and includes all children's DI scenarios, it will most likely do very well!!!

I found this book to have mostly "feel good" language ie "I'm special and my daddy loves me" rather than a good,clear explanation of what donor insemination is. It also had a couple of real clankers in it - the worst one was "here's me in my Mommys tummy" Mommy's tummy?? This is biologically incorrect information that parents tell their children because they are too embarrassed to use the word "uterus". I will actually white this out in the book before I read it to my child. It might serve as a general reinforcement to your child that it's ok to be a product of donor insemination, but don't expect valuable information from this book.