Dam Parenting

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. And what I felt wasn't "the system failed me." It was "I've failed. Again."

In this one:

– What a late ADHD diagnosis actually feels like as a parent
– Why ADHD medication not working can feel like a personal failure
– New University of Warwick research linking ADHD to gut problems, IBS and constipation
– Why calling it a deficit of attention was always a con — it's regulation, not concentration
– Why neurodivergent mothers burn out more than everyone else
– And why "just rest" is the most useless advice ever given to a working parent

All of October is ADHD on DAM Parenting — for you, your partner, your kids. Debby on sex and intimacy when your brain won't settle. Adina on the grief nobody warns you about after a late diagnosis. Kate on raising neurodivergent children here. Mimi on languages. And Liam and me on a Saturday, going through everything we've tried that didn't work.

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🎧 Last month's episode on regulation with Adina Petre

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 popular piece of bilingual parenting advice.

We also get into the child who seems embarrassed by the home language, one easy thing to try this week, and what to do if you feel you've already lost ground.

For international parents raising bilingual and multilingual children in the Netherlands, where Dutch at school can quickly become Dutch at home too.

Get the free Multilingual Cheat Sheet when you join the DAM Parenting newsletter

Check out our website: damparenting.nl

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.

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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.