Your intuition about the nature of God’s love is correct, but it seems your reaction to the word “deserve” is getting in your way.

Let’s consider the baby analogy in a little more detail. We do not require newborn babies to deserve or earn our love; we just love them.

Then as time passes, youngsters demonstrate the ability to sin: snatching their playmates’ toys, finding ways to blame others, and so on. Suddenly the cuteness factor doesn’t go as far as it used to. ‘Deserving’ means that they have acted in such a way as to merit a particular response; so when the kids have been bad, their misbehavior does not deserve beneficence. When we love them in the midst of their mischief, it isn’t because their deeds have earned a positive response from us.

I think elementary school children can readily understand this. They know what it is to do bad things, and to feel guilty, and to recognize that they can say that are sorry and want to be forgiven yet not deserve forgiveness, because they have not done anything to merit it. They have experienced it the other way around too: someone has hurt them, and now claims to be sorry, but hasn’t done anything to deserve to be forgiven.

If forgiveness happens in such instances, it will be by grace: the decision to love and forgive without requiring the other person to earn that forgiveness.

The notion the catechism emphasizes (from Ephesians 2:8-9 and many other texts) is that this is how God deals with us, choosing to save us apart from any merit on our part. It is not the case that God loves us if we have been good and earned that right, and hates us when we are bad and deserve punishment. Instead, without any consideration of whether we deserve it or not, grace is “God’s free gift of love that I do not deserve and cannot earn.”