We decided that our child (about 2½ years old, currently) was ready ready to
learn some of the basics about human reproduction, so we obtained this
incredible picture book for her, called *What Makes a Baby*, by Cory Silverberg,
illustrated by Fiona Smyth. It meets our needs in that it's very simple without
being condescending, it describes some things she's ready to know (gametes, the
human uterus) without overcomplicating things or contradicting the realities of
her immediate family by introducing assumptions about the gender of anyone
involved or conflating parenthood with biological parenthood. (Her biological
parents are parents to her, but not her only parents.) And it manages to make
human life sound… miraculous, or beautiful, without introducing a lot of obtuse
metaphors. In the interest of simplicity of language, it does describe DNA as
"so many stories about the body" that the gamete came from, and describes the
fertilization process as a dance between sperm and egg, in which the sperm and
egg tell each other their stories (share DNA) and ultimately become one thing (a
zygote). She's fascinated with the book. She loves the part about "so many
stories" and when I first read her the part about how a baby grows in a uterus,
but not everybody has a uterus, she understood it enough to interject, "*You*
have a uterus."
"Actually, I *don't* have a uterus, but Baba has a uterus," I said, referring to
another of her parents. And now she has some idea what a uterus is, and she
knows who in her immediate family has a uterus, and she knows that she can't
tell just by looking at someone whether they have a uterus, and she knows
approximately where in the body it is.
She has an intense curiosity about so many things, our child. She has a few
board books from the Baby University series (*Newtonian Physics for Babies*,
*General Relativity for Babies*, and *Astrophysics for Babies*). I was afraid
they might be a little too abstract for her, but they're among her favorite
books; she asks for them by name and has some of the text memorized, so she can
"read" it aloud to us as we turn the pages.
She constantly asks about the composition of things she interacts with. About
the foods we feed her, the music we share with her, the art she sees, she'll
often ask, "What's in this?" I love it when she asks that.
