Dam Parenting

TW: this episode talks about miscarriage and pregnancy loss. Skip it if today isn't the day. It will be here. Released on Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day 15 October 2026, this episode is for anyone who has lost a pregnancy or a baby while living in the Netherlands, and for anyone supporting someone who has. Melissa, an American living in Rotterdam, went through three pregnancy losses i...

Is it ADHD, or is your child just exhausted from a new school, a new language and a new country? It's #ADHDAwarenessMonth. Child psychologist Kate Berger from the Expat Kids Club on why some kids hold it together all day and fall apart at the front door, what a Dutch teacher really means by "druk", and how to get from a first worry to an assessment. Plus the one thing she says parent...

Does ADHD affect your sex life? If you or your partner has ADHD, "not tonight" can land like a door slamming, and nobody has told either of you why. It's ADHD Awareness Month, and DAM ex goes there. Sex and intimacy counsellor Debby Poort explains why the intense early spark shifts, what rejection sensitivity does in the bedroom, and why so many couples end up feeling more like paren...

Kicking off ADHD Awareness Month with the least polished episode I've ever made. Recorded nine hours before it went out, at my kitchen table, in one take. The deadline is the only thing that has ever made me do anything. I was diagnosed in my forties — the same month this podcast launched. Three medications in three months, none of which worked, and then I was told I'd maxed out my dose. A...

Your child understands every word of your home language, and answers you in Dutch. Every time. If it started when school or daycare went back, you're not imagining it. Why does my bilingual child only answer in Dutch? Mimi from Growing Up Multilingual explains why the school language takes over so fast, whether you should insist on a reply in your language, and why she'd retire one very po...

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 ch...

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...

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...

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 Ma...

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 cof...

📬 Get the monthly email: damparenting.nl — everything from the podcast, in four minutes. 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...

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 w...

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 Mi...

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...

After Wednesdays school lunch episodes, i have recieved several DM's asking for hints and tips about schools - and without asking everyone to go back listeniing to the numerous episodes we already have in our archive - I decided to magpie this episode, and grab a selection of learnings from previous episodes and also add in a few of my own. In the Netherlands children start basisschool the day...

What do you actually put in a Dutch school lunch box? Parents at an Amsterdam school sent in 11 photos of their children's real lunch and snack boxes, and children's nutritionist Mélody goes through three of them with us — what's working, what a child's body genuinely needs to get through a school day, and what she'd change. This one is for you whether your child starts school...

DAM Parenting says the stuff out loud that you might be thinking — just in your headphones, on your own time, when you're not quite ready to say it to anyone else yet. In episode 4 of DAM Sex, Eva is back with sex and intimacy counsellor Debby Poort to talk about something that doesn't get said enough — and not in the way it usually gets said. Sex is good for you. Not as a favour to your p...

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...

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 Mulltili...

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...

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-...

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 lang...

This episode is brought to you by MamaSocial , who connect mums across the Netherlands so you actually have a community to lean on. Brunches, mingles, networking, whatever you need — MamaSocial will be hosting something near you. Check out their website and Instagram to find your nearest one now. Have you ever had sex because saying no felt harder than just getting it over with? In episode 3 of DA...

When Aldo's daughter arrived via surrogacy in Canada, he looked around and realised he'd spent 10 years focused on becoming a dad — and forgotten to build a community for her. So he started a WhatsApp group for four or five families. Within months, it had grown to 250 members from every corner of the Netherlands. In this episode, Aldo — founder of Queer Families NL — talks about what it ac...

Your child speaks the school language all year without thinking. Your language — the one you grew up in, the one your parents use, the one you hoped would just stick — has to fight for space. And then summer comes. You get on a plane. And suddenly the whole dynamic shifts. In this episode, Eva talks to multilingualism specialist Mimi about what really happens to language development when families...