The van Putten Diaries

Sometime in the spring of last year, I started waking up every single day with a headache.  It kept me in a fog all day and made me irritable all the time.   After a couple of months, I went to the doctor, who checked my ears and said they were fine.  She recommended physical therapy for my jaw.  So I went to the physical therapist and after several weeks of adjustments and training, my headache was finally better.   Alongside the physical therapy, I started going to get regular massages.  The headache issue was clearly caused by a neck strain I'd gotten at the beginning of the year that affected my jaw in such a way that my whole head suffered. Long story short(ish), I started really trying to take better care of myself last year.  Some of it started in 2024 with some gender-affirming care, but last year was when I really started pushing away all of the other obligations and zoomed in on myself. And it's really gotten me thinking - I am spen...

Miles declared recently, seemingly out of the blue, that when he is of the age to learn his 3rd language at school, he would learn French.  He said that if he could speak English, Chinese, and French (or Spanish) that he would be able to speak to most people in the world, and it sounded like that idea really appealed to him. I asked Miles if speaking multiple languages felt like a superpower... and he said no.  He said it just felt normal.  We reminded him of how difficult he found it to engage with other kids when we first got here and he didn't speak Dutch - didn't he feel that that experience signified that it wasn't actually normal?  Maybe, he replied, but he mostly just pretended that we hadn't mentioned that aspect at all. I certainly think being multilingual is a superpower, and I have always thought so, but I can also understand why Miles might disagree, even considering the difficulties he faced in his first few months here.  The culture around language...

I was asked recently about parenting in the Netherlands and I didn't have time to fully respond, but I've been thinking about it ever since.  I last wrote along this line in  my post about lifestyle changes  about 10 months ago and I've obviously gathered a lot more data since then, so lets dive into an update.  While you should definitely click that link above to read the whole thing (all of which is still perfectly applicable and fills me with joy), my previous summary is still 100% on-point: The difference between the two countries as a kid is staggering, and we haven't even gotten to experience much in this context yet.  When we visited here two years ago, we asked a fellow American about neighborhoods that were family friendly yet still in the city - and she laughed.  "Well... all of them.  This is a very family-friendly country" she said.  Kids have much more independence here and freedom to be themselves.  It's safer, by a long shot, s...

For some reason, I became very interested in the secondary education system a few weeks ago.  I read as much as I could find about it, asked my neighbors and coworkers about their experiences with it, and wandered around the city looking for the schools themselves. If you read my first post about education here, you'll hopefully remember that everything is open enrollment.  As an American, this idea seems pretty self-explanatory at the primary education level, but the process is drastically more interesting at the secondary level. The biggest thing that I think will be difficult for American minds to understand is that the expectation here is for the students themselves to pick their high school .  I know, how amazing is it to live in a society that believes minors are their own people capable of understanding enough about who they are to make their own choices and understand how those choices could affect their future?  Anyway, from around age 11 students will begi...

If you ask a Dutch person, they would say to not expect too much from the medical system here.  It's known for not taking concerns very seriously and suggesting paracetamol for just about everything.  They'll say it's too bureaucratic, that it takes too long to navigate the procedural steps, and that there's not enough choice. But. In my opinion, the Dutch (just like everyone else) also really like to complain.  And when you tell them how much it costs to simply exist in the American healthcare system without even having seen a doctor yet ($15k per year for 3 of the 4 members of our family, just in monthly premiums), they will relent and say something like "That's absolutely absurd.  Yes, I suppose our system is worth it for what you pay." And what do we pay in medical premiums here in the Netherlands?  Well... our kids are free... because all minors, regardless of their family's income level, are covered by the government here for any and all medical ...

So far, we have spent 7 months in the Dutch school system.  The kids have attended 2 different schools and we have toured 3 others, all of which are in one city.  This is, of course, a very limited scope, but enough to observe the differences from our experiences in US schools.  In this post, I'm going to talk about our direct experiences rather than the full detail of how the system works, start to finish.  I found this post extremely helpful to help wrap my head around the overarching ideas behind the system itself:   https://www.expatica.com/nl/education/children-education/dutch-education-system-100816/ What have these 7 months in school looked like, logistically? The first school the kids attended was in a diverse, working-class neighborhood with what appeared to be mostly second or third generation students - fully Dutch speaking students with backgrounds from Turkey, Morocco, Poland, and elsewhere that I didn't hear direct reference to.  Other th...

Our neighbor said something a couple of days ago that has stuck with me.  We were continuing the generic "get to know you" stuff, us as internationals and she a Dutch person.  Towards the end, she said "It's not that the lifestyle there [in the US] is bad , it just wasn't the right fit for you ." I think this idea is something I've felt, but I hadn't been able to frame for myself in this context.  The way in which we live - our lifestyle - includes, and is determined by, so many factors that it's difficult to pin down.  But since moving here, something has just clicked.  I feel like I've settled into a memory foam pillow.  The feeling of something always being just slightly wrong has lifted off my shoulders.  I feel so much freer here.   I'm clearly still struggling to put what I'm feeling into words, but I think the lifestyle changes have had a huge positive impact on my everyday life and wellbeing.  When we decided to move, these th...