Dam Parenting

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

One of you reaches for sex to feel close. The other needs to feel close before sex is even on the table. Nobody is wrong, nobody is broken, and most couples never say a word of it out loud.
In Episode 5 of the DAM Sex series, sex and intimacy counsellor Debby Poort joins DAM to unpack what happens when two people in the same relationship have completely different starting points for desire — and why so much of the disconnection around sex turns out not to be about sex at all.
What we get into:
What responsive desire and spontaneous desire actually mean, and why one of them is so consistently misread as "you don't want me anymore"

Why mismatched libido in a long-term relationship is far more common, and far less personal, than it feels at 11pm

Why a man wanting sex is so often not about what his partner assumes it's about

What happens in new parent couples when one partner is exhausted and touched out for months and the other turns to pornography — and the line Debby draws between when that's neutral and when it's a problem

How to open that conversation at home without it landing as an accusation

Why couples from different countries, families and faiths are working from completely different sexual scripts, and what to do when those scripts contradict each other

What Debby wishes partners understood about arousal, the orgasm gap, and how long things actually take

The one conversation she has in her practice more than any other — and why couples visibly relax the moment they hear it

If you have ever thought "they're never in the mood," or been on the receiving end of "is that all you ever think about," this is the episode.
About Debby Debby Poort is a sex and intimacy counsellor based in the Netherlands, working in English with couples and individuals — including a lot of international and intercultural couples. Find her at yellowwood.nl and sexandintimacycounselling.nl. She also runs a free introductory course you can work through at home, on your own, with no commitment and no big conversation with your partner first. It's a genuinely low-stakes place to start.
Ep1: Touched Out, Low Desire & Feeling Like a Feeding Machine: Let’s Talk About Sex After Baby
Ep2: ‘We’re Housemates Who Share a Bed’ — How Can Emotionally Focused Therapy Help You?
Ep3: Obligation Sex Is More Common Than You Think — Here's What It's Really Costing Your Relationship

The school bag is back out. The new lunch box is ready. And somewhere between the airport and the front door, your child tried to say something in Dutch — and it didn't come as easily as it did before you left. Does that mean something has gone wrong? Did six weeks speaking your home language undo years of work?
In this episode of Dam Parenting, Eva sits down with multilingualism specialist Mimi - from Growing Up Multilingual— back for another episode of their ongoing multilingualism series — to talk through one of the most common end-of-summer anxieties in international families: the moment the school language feels rusty.
They cover:
— What is actually happening in your child's brain after weeks in a different linguistic environment
— Why reduced activation is completely different from language loss
— What parents do that makes the transition harder (and what actually helps)
— How to talk to your child about the shift so they understand it
— and stop interpreting it as failure
— When to genuinely worry, and when to simply stay steady
Mimi also addresses younger children, preschoolers, and families whose children are starting school in Dutch for the first time this September — and what they need to know before day one.
This episode is for every multilingual family in the Netherlands returning from the homeland, heading into a new school year, and quietly wondering: are we okay? Yes. You are. And here's why. Dam Parenting is the weekly English-language podcast for international families navigating life in the Netherlands. New episodes every Wednesday.

This episode is brought to you by MamaSocial , because navigating motherhood far from home is so much better with the right women around you. Events and spaces for mothers of all backgrounds, right here in the Netherlands.

You moved here. You built a life. And somewhere along the way, you started carrying something you couldn't quite name.
In this episode, clinical psychologist and trauma therapist Adina Petre joins us to break down 7 types of trauma that show up specifically in expat and international family life — the ones that don't look like trauma from the outside, but quietly shape everything.
We cover: relocation grief, cultural identity loss, generational trauma, birth trauma in a foreign healthcare system, parenting without your support network, the psychological cost of living in a second language, and vicarious trauma in a world that won't stop delivering bad news.
This episode won't overwhelm you. It will give you words. And sometimes — that's exactly what's needed.
Share it with someone who needs the language.
Adina Petre: adinapetre.com
Follow us: @damparentingpodcast