Dam Parenting

What do you do when the school you want for your child simply doesn't exist? If you're Tim and Camilla, co-founders of Seeker — you build it.
Seeker is a brand new private bilingual Dutch-English Montessori primary school opening in Eindhoven this September. And the children starting now? They are the founding class — the ones who will set the tone, the culture, and the standard for every child who comes after them.
In this episode, Eva talks to Tim about what was missing in Eindhoven for international families, what it actually takes to open a private school inside the Dutch education system, why the inspectie only shows up after you open your doors, and what it means to ask families to trust something that has no history yet — because it's about to become history.
A short, feel-good summer episode about the audacity of building something from nothing.
Find Seeker at seeker.education

Eindhoven | Bilingual Dutch-English | Montessori | Ages 4–6 | Opening September 2026
Part of Dam Parenting's ongoing series on schools, systems, and raising children in the Netherlands.

You're away for the six weeks of school holiday in your home country. Maybe you dropped your children off and came back to work. Or you're staring down the new school year starting soon with a child who has barely spoken Dutch all summer — and a quiet worry that something has slipped.This episode is for all of it.
Eva sits down with multilingualism specialist Mimi from Growing up Mulltilingual for a wide-ranging conversation about the language anxiety that follows multilingual families through summer — whether that's a child who goes quiet in the home language when they arrive at the grandparents', a child returning to the Netherlands after weeks abroad wondering if their Dutch is still there, or a family heading into September with a child who has barely spoken the school language in months.
They cover what actually happens to language when the environment changes, why reduced activation is completely different from language loss, what the silent period really means, and the BICS versus CALP distinction that reframes what fluency actually looks like in a child.
BICS (Social Language): The conversational language used in casual, face-to-face, or everyday interactions (e.g., chatting on the playground, ordering food). Because it is highly contextualized, learners typically master this within 6 months to 2 years of immersion
CALP (Academic Language): The specialized, context-reduced language required to succeed in classroom subjects and professional settings (e.g., reading textbooks, writing essays, solving math problems). It takes significantly longer to develop—typically 5 to 7 years.
Mimi also has something important to say about the child who compares themselves to monolingual cousins and feels behind — and why that comparison is never a fair one.
For multilingual families in the Netherlands navigating summer, the homeland, and the return to the academic year.

Feeling like an exhausted parent before the summer holidays have even started? You're allowed to be. This short, one-take episode — no editing, no polish, on purpose — is a reality check on parent burnout, the mental load, and why holidays with young kids are not actually holidays (they're taking the show on the road).
Recorded at the start of the Dutch summer break, this episode gives you permission to rest before you crash — because burnout doesn't send a calendar invite, and the signs of parental exhaustion are easy to miss until someone points them out. Consider this that someone.
Inside: a four-question burnout self-check you can do on the bike, why the gap between how you're doing and how you say you're doing is the first warning light, lowering the bar for the school holidays without guilt, and why five minutes a day beats the 5K run you keep not doing. With a little help from Brené Brown's Daring Greatly and Leonard Cohen's beauty of cracks.
Part of DAM Parenting's ongoing conversation about what it actually takes to stay well while raising kids far from home — because parents don't need fixing, they need conditions where they can function.

You catch a smell. A lotion, a tea, something cooking. And in under a second — before you've even thought about it — you're home.
That's not nostalgia. That's not weakness. That is your nervous system doing something remarkable.
This week we're joined by psychologist and cross-cultural specialist Elif Durgel, founder of Roots and Wings Academy in Eindhoven, for a warm, science-light conversation about why smell bypasses the thinking brain entirely and connects directly to memory, identity and emotion — and what that means for international parents living far from where they started.
We talk about:
Why smell hits faster and deeper than any other sense
What nervous system regulation actually feels like from the inside
The invisible extra load of living between cultures — and why July makes it louder
Why so many of us quietly deny ourselves the things that help
Why going to the expat shop isn't retail therapy — it's something more real than that
Whether you're heading home this summer, somewhere completely new, or discovering the Netherlands in July for the first time — this one is your permission slip.
20 minutes. No jargon. Just a really good conversation.

Find out more about Elif: rootsandwingsacademy.nl
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Have you ever reacted to something and thought — why did I react like that? Or carried a weight you couldn't quite name?
Today we're breaking down what trauma actually is — plainly, warmly, and without the jargon. Because if you're living in the Netherlands as an expat or immigrant, building a life far from home, navigating a foreign healthcare system, raising children in a second language — this conversation is for you.
We're joined by Adina Petre, clinical psychologist and trauma therapist , who will be joining us monthly to help us understand ourselves a little better, one episode at a time.
In this episode:
— What trauma actually is (and what it isn't)
— The difference between Big T and Little T trauma
— Why the nervous system doesn't grade on a curve
— What happens when we stay in survival mode for too long
— And why your experience is real, because it happened to you — and that is enough
Share this episode with someone who needs the words.