How Do You Make a Baby?

The question most parents dread the most from their child is likely the baby question: Where do babies come from? While more and more modern parents acknowledge the importance of answering this question factually, many struggle with how to do so. What words and language are appropriate? How much information is enough, without being too much?

This book by Anna Fiske is an excellent teaching tool and conversation starter for this tricky topic. How Do You Make a Baby? starts off with love, just like babies do. Fiske explains that there are many types of love: platonic love between friends and for pets, romantic love between two adults. From there, Fiske delves into the basics of sexual intercourse, which leads to how babies are actually made, pregnancy, and birth.

This book is fantastically inclusive: relationships between both opposite-sex and same-sex couples are included; the pictures depict a wide range of body types, shapes, and colors; IVF and assisted reproductive technology are touched on; and while it sticks to the standard line of all births occurring in hospitals (the inclusion of birth centers and home birth would’ve been great!), it helps to normalize surgical/cesarean birth as well.