Dam Parenting

The Dutch and English langauges are everywhere. The language your child speaks with their grandmother? Almost nowhere outside your front door. And kids notice.
Mimi joins me for a short one about Taalparade, a free multilingual family day for children aged 0–12. We talk about why seeing your home language out in the world matters more than any lesson about diversity, and why asking a bilingual child to "say something" in their language can backfire.
For international families raising multilingual children in the Netherlands.
Taalparade:
Saturday 7 November,
11:00–16:00,
Library Amstelveen (next to the shopping centre).
It's Free.
Whether your family speaks one language or five, you're invited.

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
Subscribe to the monthly newsletter for international parents in the Netherlands: damparenting.subscribepage.io

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.