Dam Parenting

Camila moved here for love straight out of university, spent sixteen years climbing at a big media company, and quickly built Joy In Organizing a business with 77,000 followers and a book deal. Then came burnout, a divorce that ate €45,000 in legal fees, and nine months of job applications that went nowhere.
This summer she got on a bike with an Uber Eats bag. The reel she made about it has over a million views now.
This episode is about shame. The kind that makes you go quiet instead of asking for help — and what happened the day she messaged every single person she knew, including a man she once rented a bike from.
We talk about carrying a household financially for years, what divorce costs when you have no family in the country, why supermarket and restaurant shifts don't work if you're the only adult in the house, and why she says you should never confuse needing help with failing.
For anyone raising children in a country they didn't grow up in, working a system nobody explained to them, and wondering how they'd survive doing it alone.

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Tried breathwork, silent retreats, sound baths and every calming app going, and still can't relax? You're not bad at it. Your nervous system might just need something different.
 
In episode 3 of DAM Trauma, trauma therapist Adina Petre explains nervous system regulation in plain English. No Latin, no diagrams, no pressure.
 
In this episode:
– What regulation actually means (it isn't feeling calm all the time)
– The window of tolerance, hyperarousal and hypoarousal, for parents running on empty
– Why fight, flight and freeze are automatic, not a willpower problem
– Co-regulation when your support network is a plane ride away
– What constantly adapting to a new country does to your nervous system
– The one thing Adina says doesn't exist at all
– A simple, slightly playful tool you can build tonight from an old shoebox
 
For international, expat and immigrant parents in the Netherlands dealing with parental burnout, brain fog, the mental load and the everyday stress of raising a family abroad.
 
If this episode brings up something bigger than a podcast can hold, talk to your huisarts or contact Adina directly.
 
Adina Petre: Instagram
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Living in a diverse city does not teach a child about race. Parents have to do that on purpose.
A four-year-old on a playdate in Utrecht told her friend's mother that the girl's dad was scary because he has a brown face. An hour later, outside a supermarket, she asked whether he steals money too. Her parents are not racist.
Maya was born and raised in the Netherlands. Mo is biracial — a Malian father, a French mother, a childhood between Abidjan and Paris, fifteen years in the Netherlands. They are raising a four-year-old daughter here in the Netherlands.
In this episode:
— What to say when a child says something racist, and why you do not have to answer in the moment
— Why blaming the other parents is usually wrong, and what to say to them instead
— How to introduce race to a toddler or preschooler without a formal conversation
— Why the infamous 'Amsterdam's 180 nationalities' do not produce mixed friendship groups

Questions this episode answers:
What age should you start talking to children about race?
Does it make my child racist if they say something racist?
Is living in a multicultural city enough?

This episode is brought to you in partnerhsip with MamaSocial
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Schools back in session and nobody's ready. The alarms are back, the shoes are missing, and somewhere in your inbox is a school calendar you haven't properly looked at yet.
So Eva sat down with Liam — also known as Dad Do Art, self-declared Vulnerable Dad number Two — got the calendar out, and went through the whole Dutch school year. Month by month. Not a masterclass. Two parents, two coffees, and nine months of what's actually coming.
What's in it: studiedagen and why you mark every single one this week, while you're still an optimist. School apps. What happens when there's no substitute teacher, and why the playdate swap isn't the fluffy part of parenting — it's the emergency infrastructure. Herfstvakantie and why you're already late to book. The Sinterklaas intocht, and the small matter of celebrating two men in red who arrive by completely different transport. The long January stretch: darkness, sickness, and lice. The May holiday, which is in April. Keti Koti. And the summer finish line, when everyone gets sick the second they stop.
Plus the things nobody tells you: why the school gates feel awkward and it isn't you, why you should ask a parent — not the teacher — about the class WhatsApp group, and how one Friday afternoon on an empty playground turned into an actual village.
Here's the reframe that started it. There's a US Surgeon General advisory on parental stress that names the mismatch between how work is structured and how children's schedules are structured as a core driver of parental burnout. You're not failing at logistics. The logistics were built by someone who's never met a working parent.
For international parents, expat families, and anyone whose child has just started group 1, 2 or 3 at a Dutch basisschool — whether you're three weeks in or three days in.
Send this to one parent who's just started school, or is about to. Consider that your first volunteer act.
DAM Parenting — helping parents navigate Dutch systems while raising children far from home.

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Your child went back to school and seemed fine. Then week two happened.
For internationally mobile children, September isn't just a new school year. It's a re-entry. They've come back from a summer in a country that might feel more like home than this one, said goodbye to grandparents again, and walked into a classroom where they have to switch languages at the door. The tiredness doesn't show up on day one. It shows up when the adrenaline runs out.
Kate Berger is a child psychologist and the founder of the Expat Kids Club in Amstelveen and Wassenaar, where she works with internationally mobile children and their families. In this episode we talk about what September actually does to expat and third culture kids — cumulative transition fatigue, the difference between a child who's struggling with school and a child who's struggling with coming back, and why so much of what parents read as behaviour is really exhaustion.
We also get into the thing nobody says out loud: how much of a parent's own anxiety lands on a child at the school gate, and what to do about it when you're anxious for good reasons.
If your child has been more tearful, more clingy or more furious than usual since term started, this one is for you.
In this episode: re-entry after a summer abroad · why week two is harder than week one · transition fatigue and how it accumulates over years · what internationally mobile children lose that nobody names · how parent anxiety transfers at the school gate · what actually helps, and what makes it worse.
Kate Berger runs the Expat Kids Club ( www.expatkidsclub.com — Insttagram @expatkidsclub.)
Part of DAM Parenting's ongoing series on what it actually takes to raise children in a country you didn't grow up in.
New episodes every Wednesday.
www.damparenting.nl