Baby Shower Trivia
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174 free Baby Shower trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
49 free baby shower trivia questions with answers. Baby trivia for a baby shower should be easy enough that Grandma and the college roommate both have a shot, and surprising enough that the room argues about it. That is the mix here: how many bones a newborn has, why babies do not have real kneecaps, what the Apgar score actually checks, who the Gerber baby grew up to be, and which cartoon toddler's pacifier is more famous than her voice. Play it as a party game. Read each question aloud, let guests write their answers on a card, and give a prize to the highest score. Or hand the phone round and let people play in turns while the food goes out. Questions arrive one at a time with four choices, instant scoring and a one-line explanation, so nobody needs to have read a parenting book to keep up. Between rounds, slip in a few baby shower parent trivia questions of your own — how the parents-to-be met, the due date, the names they nearly picked. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and the source is shown under each explanation, so if a fact starts a debate you can settle it in one tap.
30 of 174 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A baby is born with dozens more bones than an adult has, because many of them later do what?
Fuse together
Fuse together: a newborn's roughly 270 to 300 bones knit down to an adult's 206, which is how the separate vertebrae at the base of the spine become the single sacrum.
Q 02A newborn's kneecap is made of what?
Soft cartilage
Soft cartilage: softer and more flexible than bone, it only starts turning into a bony kneecap when a child is around three.
Q 03What is the everyday name for the fontanelles, the membranous gaps between the bones of a baby's skull?
Soft spots
Soft spots: the gaps let the skull's plates overlap so the head can squeeze through the birth canal, then leave room for a fast-growing brain.
Q 04The word "infant" comes from a Latin word meaning what?
Unspeaking
Unspeaking: Latin infans meant 'not able to speak', and the same word, by way of the Italian for a youth, later gave armies their infantry.
Q 05A child's 20 baby teeth, which are shed in childhood, are known to dentists by what name?
Deciduous teeth
Deciduous teeth: like trees that drop their leaves, they are named from the Latin for 'to fall off', and until they go they hold the spacing for the adult teeth.
Q 06What is the waxy white coating on a newborn's skin at birth called?
Vernix
Vernix: the cheese-like coating is thought to shield a baby's skin from months in amniotic fluid, and its full Latin name, vernix caseosa, means 'cheesy varnish'.
Q 07New parents lose sleep partly because newborns arrive with no sense of what?
Day and night
Day and night: newborns sleep around the clock, and a tiny stomach that cannot hold much milk wakes them to feed every few hours, whatever the time.
Q 08By roughly what age has the umbilical cord stump usually dried up and dropped off?
Three weeks
Three weeks: the stump has usually dried up and dropped off by then, and one that hangs on much longer gets checked, since it can point to an infection or an immune problem.
Q 09The Apgar newborn score was devised in 1952 by a doctor in which specialty?
Anesthesiology
Anesthesiology: Virginia Apgar trained as a surgeon at Columbia, but the chairman of surgery steered her into the young field of anesthesia, where she devised the score in 1952.
Q 10A perfect 10 on the Apgar newborn test is rare because almost every baby loses a point for what?
Blue hands and feet
Blue hands and feet: each sign scores 0 to 2, and a pink body with bluish hands and feet, normal until a newborn warms up, earns only 1 for colour.
Q 11The rooting reflex helps a newborn do what?
Find the nipple
Find the nipple: stroking a newborn's cheek makes it turn toward the touch and open its mouth, helping it locate the nipple; the reflex fades by around four months.
Q 12What is the reflex called in which a newborn's fingers clamp tightly around anything pressed into its hand?
The palmar grasp
The palmar grasp: the grip is strong enough that a newborn can almost be lifted by its hands, and it is thought to be a leftover from primate babies clinging to their mothers' fur.
Q 13The Moro reflex, in which a baby flings out its arms then pulls them in, responds to what?
A sudden loss of support
Q 21English godparents in Tudor times customarily gave a baby which silver gift at its baptism?
A spoon
A spoon: the handle often ended in a tiny figure of an apostle, and birth gifts stayed tied to the christening for centuries; the baby shower only took off in America after the Second World War.
Q 22The 2008 blog post credited with starting gender reveal parties revealed a baby's sex using what?
A cake
A cake: Jenna Karvunidis's 2008 blog post described cutting into a cake with pink icing inside; by 2019 she was publicly regretting the increasingly extravagant trend she had started.
Q 23In European folklore, which bird is said to bring babies to new parents?
The stork
A sudden loss of support: Ernst Moro first drew the reflex out by slapping the pillow on both sides of a baby's head, and doctors today let the head drop back for an instant instead.
Q 14The first milk a mother produces, rich in antibodies, is called what?
Colostrum
Colostrum: nicknamed 'liquid gold' for its deep yellow colour, it also works as a gentle laxative that helps a newborn pass its first stool.
Q 15Deaf babies raised with sign language repeat meaningless hand movements over and over, a manual form of which stage of speech development?
Babbling
Babbling: hearing babies do it aloud with strings of sounds like 'bababa', and a 1991 study took the signing version as evidence that babbling belongs to language itself, not just to speech.
Q 16The crusty, oily scaly patches sometimes seen on a baby's scalp are commonly known as what?
Cradle cap
Cradle cap: the greasy yellowish scales look alarming but are harmless, neither itchy nor painful, and usually clear up on their own within a few months.
Q 17One theory links the Yoruba people's record-high rate of twin births to eating plenty of which staple food?
Yam
Yam: southwest Nigeria has the world's highest twinning rate, and one unproven theory credits a local yam whose natural plant oestrogen may prompt the ovaries to release two eggs.
Q 18Twins that grow from two separate eggs, each fertilised by its own sperm, are known as what?
Fraternal twins
Fraternal twins: they share about half their genes, like any brother and sister, which is why one can be a boy and the other a girl.
Q 19Which girls' name overtook Emma in 2019 to become the most popular for newborns in the United States?
Olivia
Olivia: Shakespeare gave the then-rare name to the countess in Twelfth Night, and four centuries on it ended Emma's five-year run at number one.
Q 20Children of the post-war baby boomers were nicknamed 'echo boomers', a generation better known by what name?
Millennials
Millennials: births rose again from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s as boomers had children of their own, an echo of the post-war surge.
The stork: German folklore had it finding babies in caves or marshes and carrying them home in a basket, and Hans Christian Andersen's tale 'The Storks' spread the story far and wide.
Q 24What was meant to pull the shell-shaped baby carriage that William Kent built in 1733 for a duke's children?
A goat or small pony
A goat or small pony: Kent's richly decorated carriage for the 3rd Duke of Devonshire worked like a miniature coach, drawn by an animal instead of pushed by a nurse.
Q 25In 1946 Marion Donovan stitched the first prototype of her waterproof diaper cover, the 'Boater', out of which household item?
A shower curtain
A shower curtain: Donovan cut up a series of them to perfect the design, then made the version sold at Saks Fifth Avenue from 1949 in nylon parachute cloth, with snaps in place of pins.
Q 26Pampers began in 1961 after P&G's Victor Mills tired of changing whose cloth diapers?
His grandchild's
His grandchild's: Mills, a P&G chemical engineer, disliked changing his newborn grandchild's cloth diapers, set his team on a disposable alternative and used his grandchildren as testers.
Q 27Ann Turner Cook, the model for the famous Gerber Baby drawing, grew up to work as what?
A teacher and novelist
A teacher and novelist: Cook taught English in Tampa and later wrote mystery novels; her neighbour's quick charcoal sketch of her won Gerber's 1928 hunt for a baby face.
Q 28Sophie the Giraffe went on sale in France on 25 May 1961 and was named for what link to that date?
A saint's feast day
A saint's feast day: 25 May honours Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat, so the toy took her name, and it has been a classic first gift for French newborns ever since.
Q 29The teddy bear got its name after President Theodore Roosevelt refused to do what on a 1902 hunt?
Shoot a captured bear
Shoot a captured bear: his guides had tied the animal to a tree for him, he called that unsporting, and a cartoon of the scene inspired a Brooklyn shopkeeper's 'Teddy's bear'.
Q 30Cabbage Patch Kids famously came with a birth certificate and which other document?
Adoption papers
Adoption papers: each Cabbage Patch Kid came with a birth certificate and adoption papers for the new owner to sign; Coleco's mass-produced version set off the 1983 holiday toy stampede.