We hope this little catechism will help you and your children to praise God.…by the time your baby has mastered this catechism he or she will probably be time to move on to memorizing short Bible verses, and a children’s catechism.

My wife Emily and I found significant challenges in feeding our first baby solid food. Even if we could get her started on the process, it seemed to her too much bother to ever finish. So, we distracted her. We asked her where to find her nose, her eyes, her ears, and over time she learned to point in the general direction of most facial features. She wanted to please us, and she was happy with what she was learning. And without really noticing it, she ate.

That gave us an idea. We had been wondering how to teach our children about God and when to start. There are many ways in which the Christian life can be modelled before our children, but we wanted to introduce our children to our God in a formal way as soon as was possible. We recognized that in answering our questions they would initially be trying to please us without understanding the concepts that we were teaching them. But we trusted that God would be honoured when children honour a father or mother, and he has assured us that even infants can praise him. So, we began to catechize.

When we began this process, our child could not talk. But she could point and produce hand signals, so we developed a catechism that did not require much in the way of words. That catechism is provided below with comments on our questions and answers. As you’ll see, it is more about the milk than the meat of the Word, but it seeks to get some key truths across.

The Baby’s Catechism: A Few Comments on Method

A few general comments with respect to method may be useful. First, for each of our children we began asking the first few questions while they were captive audiences in their highchairs. Once they understood that their responses made their parents happy, we shifted the question-and-answer session into family worship. Second, we realized that we needed to begin with simple questions and answers and then move to more complex ones as speech developed. This proved challenging.

On the one hand, we were convinced that we should begin with God, even though our child could not yet talk. Eventually we decided to ask who made her, and then to praise her for whatever noise she made for “God”—all the while hoping and praying that this all-important word would in time come to be pronounced properly, reverently, and with great joy.

On the other hand, we wanted to maintain a logical flow to the catechism. To accommodate our child’s (and then our children’s) development, we were required to go back and insert a couple questions and lengthen a couple answers. Did this confuse our children? Not really. The addition and extension of questions took a few days to get used to, but none provided lasting difficulty. We simply began to provide the full answers ourselves and in time they imitated us. Naturally, memorizing the answers to the longer questions proceeded at a slower rate than the shorter ones. But the difference was not great since, as with many children, their capacity for learning new questions and answers grew rapidly.

We hope this little catechism will help you and your children to praise God. You may see a need to abridge or expand it, but by the time your baby has mastered this catechism he or she will probably be time to move on to memorizing short Bible verses, and a children’s catechism, such as those published by Christian Focus or Great Commissions Publications.

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