How to Help your Baby or Toddler Adapt to Ramadan Timings

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Wondering how to adjust your baby or toddler’s routine to your Ramadan schedule ? If you are worried about how to tweak your child’s routine to Ramadan timings and how you will cope juggling the little children with Iftaar and Suhoor, here’s how to adjust their bedtime and wake timings with just one small adjustment.

There is hardly a month left until Ramadan, so it is the perfect time to start your Ramadan preparation with the kids. You will need some good ideas to make Ramadan fun with the kids.

I have written a survival guide for mums to prepare for Ramadan, but we need a few more ideas than that for the routine.

Since there is still some time until Ramadan, I think this is the best time to make a few changes to ensure that the kids are all set to accommodate our lifestyle change too. I am sharing one tip that has helped me and I am sure many of you with little kids can benefit from.

Why you need to adapt your baby or toddlers to Ramadan timings

When you have little children at home, Ramadan means late nights, late mornings, boredom through the day and chaos at Iftaar time for most households. The parents are usually tired from fasting through the day and want some time to relax in the evenings but the kids cannot understand that.

For little kids, Ramadan doesn’t look any different from the rest of the year (apart from their parents’ behaviour). They don’t know you are eating or sleeping at different times than usual. They don’t even know that you are fasting.

You may be tired and have a little bit more work in the kitchen but the kids know nothing. They only know hunger, sleep and play. Therefore, one of the first things that I recommend to do before Ramadan begins is to gradually tweak the kids’ routines so that they are less tired at the end of the day, and maybe their bedtime routine is a little delayed.

Please note that this article was written in 2015, when I had a baby , a toddler and a 7 year old. This tip still holds and it has helped many mothers around the world. I teach all about routines in my course on Routine Planning for Children.

Every child has a routine that they follow

Please note that in this article, we are talking about how to get your child to stay up a little later than usual if your child follows the 7 am to 7 pm routine. This may not work for you if your bedtime routine is already all wrong and kids sleep at 11 pm or so. In that case, however, you may not need to change your routine at all.

Normally, children follow a natural body clock of waking at 7 am and going to sleep by 7 pm. Those are their natural timings. Since babies and toddlers need 12-14 hours of sleep, they will need a full 12 hour sleep at night plus an additional nap or two during the day. But this may or may not be the case with your family.

Most parents, due to their lifestyle, try to tweak their children’s timings to sleep later than usual. This is not right and most of them know it, but they try to get the children to sleep later than usual and hope that their child will sleep in in the morning.

If you have older children then then too, due to school timings, they may be going to bed earlier and waking up much earlier.

Ramadan timings mean later than usual bedtimes

My toddlers’ bedtime is  at 7 pm and my older child sleeps at 9p m. These timings will not work in Ramadan because 7 pm is usually the Iftaar time here. We will be having dinner at that time. Also, I want my 7 year old son to go for Taraweeh with his dad in Ramadan too. He will not come home before 10.30 pm.

You can imagine how much chaos there will be at this time if the kids aren’t trained to sleep later.

Children usually have an inner clock that means they will want to be in bed after Maghrib (sunset/ dusk). Even if you don’t have a set routine for your child, you will notice that the kids still follow a routine on their own. Those mums who have trained their kids to work on a schedule find themselves in trouble once Ramadan arrives.

For this reason, you need to make a little tweak to their bedtime but such that things don’t fall out of place in the other aspects of their life. You don’t want something that will break the calm in your life after Ramadan is over. 

How to adjust your child’s timings for Ramadan

The best way you can change the routine yet keep it from going wrong is to re-introduce their later afternoon nap.

Most tots give up on the later afternoon nap as they grow up but I have found that by reintroducing it for the month of Ramadan, I can cook my Iftaar in peace and then eat my dinner before I get the babies in bed for the night.

In normal circumstances, most babies and tots sleep for 15 minutes in the late afternoon which they give up as they grow older. When it is not Ramadan, I will be trying to keep the afternoon activities calm so that they do not get too tired for bedtime earlier.  I re- introduce this nap time to let them sleep for 45 minutes. That means they will not be sleepy till 9 pm at night. It also means that they will get up a little bit later in the morning.

Here is how to plan your child’s day and set a routine for them if you are unsure about how to make this change.

If you don’t have a routine for your child then now is a good time to create one.

If you have never had a routine for your child, I recommend checking this 3 year old child’s routine that we have used. We also have different routines for different ages in our resource library. 

Most children get up early, and when mommy wants to sleep in or is too tired to get up, they get very restless.

The first step is to understand your child’s needs.

• When does he eat, when does he want to sleep. Make a note of these things first.
• Monitor his routine for a few days without making any changes to it.
• Note down when he is getting up, eating, napping or doing random things.

After a week, design a routine around it. You will know when he needs his food and when he wants to nap. This is one of the easiest ways to plan a routine for a child when he has not been on one previously.

When designing a routine remember that kids need a 2 hour nap at mid-day. My kids have always slept at 12 noon to 2pm ever since I set their routine by following this book. (I highly recommend this book and you can read the review by clicking on the link!) They will need one or more naps depending on their age.

Babies usually need a small 45 minute late morning nap too. Older babies and smaller tots sleep for 15 minutes in the late afternoon. We are just increasing the later afternoon nap to 45 minutes.

This trick really helped me for my children and I hope it helps you too. Would you like more ideas on how to tweak your children’s routine for Ramadan and again after Ramadan? I highly recommend you download our Calm Confident Children’s Routine Course.

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