"How do I even begin to teach my babies to know and love God?"
Millennial author Danielle Hitchen tells The Christian Post that this was the question that popped up in her mind when someone asked her what she's doing for her one-year-old daughter's spiritual growth.
Hitchen, a work-at-home mom with two children living in the Washington D.C. metro area, says that question thrown at her reverberated in her mind, leading her to the idea of establishing her own company dedicated to producing books that teach the Bible and basic tenets of Christianity to babies and toddlers.
"[The question] got me thinking that although we have storybook Bibles, a lot of them are not age appropriate for [babies and toddlers]," Hitchen says.
"So I started to conceptualise a way to teach [my young daughter] the foundational beliefs of the Christian faith in a way that she could understand. And I thought, concept books are everywhere for children and we teach them to count random things like dogs or trucks, so why don't we teach them to count meaningful things like persons of the Trinity or the days of creation?" she asks.
Hitchen then realised that a lot of Christian parents also have the same concern for their very young ones.
When she launched a fund-raising campaign on Kickstarter to produce her own array of Christian literature for babies and toddlers, it took her only four days to receive more than 90 percent of the funds needed to produce her first book. Many parents enthusiastically welcomed her idea, saying a Bible for babies is exactly the thing they want for their very young children.
Thus, she was able to launch her own book company, Catechesis Books, in February this year. She is now set to produce a series of books to catechise the next generation.
She already finished writing the first book titled "Bible Basics: A Baby Believer Counting Primer." It is scheduled for release in early December.
"One of the things that make Bible Basics unique is that it goes beyond Bible stories to actual theology," Hitchen says.
"My experience is that Bible story books are ubiquitous for children, especially for babies, toddlers and preschoolers, but there's pretty much nothing out there to teach them actual theology or more abstract biblical content like the fruits of the Spirit," she continues.
"Bible Basics" links theological concepts with pictures and Scripture. For example, the nine fruits of the Spirit are listed around creatively designed pieces of fruit, alongside the passage from Galatians 5. Thus, babies learn to count while being exposed to the Word of God.
