Child protection services has placed three children from the same family in Utrecht, ranging from 6 to 13 years old, under the supervision of a guardian for being dangerously overweight, De Telegraaf writes.

The children weighed 15, 18 and 51 kilograms too much in November 2011. The parents fought the services’ decision in court, but in a decision published in May, an judge in Arnhem found against the parents. The court felt that although it was obvious that the parents cared about their children, they lacked both the drive and the skills to deal with their children’s bad health.

According to Dutchnews.nl, “this is the thought to be the first time children in the Netherlands have been subject to a court order because of their weight”. NRC writes that in the UK, dozens of children have been placed under supervision since 2006 for being obese. Child protection services told the newspaper that they will only place children under supervision “if the parents refuse voluntary help and the problems are such that the development of the child is halted or endangered.”

Supervision means that although the children will generally get to stay with their parents, the supervisor must be consulted for all major decisions regarding the children, and orders given by the supervisor must be followed.

A high profile supervision was the 2009 case of then 13-year-old Laura Dekker who wanted to sail around the world by herself. The intent then was to determine whether Dekker was fit to sail the world by herself, although in hindsight the effect mainly seems to have been to instill a severe dislike for Dutch bureaucracy in the teen sailor.

(Photo by Quinn Dombrowski, some rights reserved)

Children are placed on their parents’ bikes as babies, they learn to cycle to school at a certain age in the Netherlands and grow up to be adults that cycle to university and work. That’s how the Dutch roll.

However, accidents happen with cars, other cyclists, one’s own mistake, ducks crossing the bike path, etc. All parties involved (well, except the ducks) blame each other and it’s part of Dutch life to fall off your bike sometimes, even in a canal. That’s how the Dutch roll.

It’s a free country, so if people (expats usually) really think their kids wearing a helmet is going to help, fine, but most people don’t unless they’re in the Tour de France. That’s how the Dutch roll.

However, it’s one thing to have your kid come home crying and/or ending up in the hospital from a cycling accident, it’s another to realise they were playing a game on their mobile phone or texting their BFF while not looking where they were going. I mean, if mommy and daddy can do that driving to the IKEA on the weekend, they can too, right?

And so there are 35% more cycling accidents according to hospital reports between 2006-2010, with campaigns concentrating on collisions with cars, which is only part of the problem. Blaming cars is easy, but if you know anything about cycling in a bigger city, cyclists are sometimes their own worst enemy.

As a copywriter once put it, “safety is boring”.

I find injured children due to lack of proper parenting even more boring.

(Link: binnenland.nieuws.nl)

A German family of two parents in their thirties and four children (11, 5, 4 and 3 months) is said to be hiding in the woods near Sibculo, Overijssel, just a few kilometres from the German border. They are hiding from the German authorities, as the court ruled that the kids had to be taken away from their parents for reasons the press doesn’t mention. They also own three dogs. The family is originally from Warendorf, East of Münster, much further away, but in a relative beeline from where they are now.

They have been moving around by bike with a trailer hitched to it since September, and the Germans want the Dutch to help them find the family, as they are worried about the children’s well-being. I still would like to know why.

If we can find terrorists, we can find a big family that can’t run, with kids and a baby, and three possibly barking dogs, right? OK, they are pretty cool travelling by bike.

(Link: binnenland.nieuws.nl)

A Dutch site about children, pregnancy and the likes, peuteren.nl is offering the free download of a song children can sing when they leave a burning school building or during a fire drill.

According to the site, the story goes that someone somewhere wondered if there was a song the kids could sing to keep their focus on getting outside in a stressful situation. Here’s ‘Het Ontruimingslied’ (‘The Evacuation Song’), easy to sing for Dutch kids as young as two-years-old.

Someone who works with kids please tell me if this is a brilliant idea or just plain weird, I honestly don’t know.

An excerpt:

We moeten nu naar buiten
Stap voor stap in de rij
Iedereen verzamelen
De deur is al nabij

(roughly)
We have to go outside
Step by step in a file
Everybody gather together
The door is not too far

For the Dutch teens who do understand German, there’s always the punk rock classic by Extrabreit, Hurra hurra die Schule brennt (Hurrah Hurrah The School is Burning).

(Link: nieuws.nl)

De Cafe Racer has launched this 10-seater school bus which comes equipped with pedals for “most of its occupants.” I think this means some kids just sit there, but I don’t quite get that.

This eco-friendly vehicle is powered entirely by pedalling kids, although the driver can switch on an actual motor if they want to get going.

The company also makes bikes with a bar like the beer bikes we posted about. Then, there’s also cargo bikes for 8 kids, with an adult peddling along.

The cities and towns in the Netherlands have a very well divided space for cyclists and drivers. When I used to work as a bike courier, before bike paths in Montréal, Canada, you had to cycle on the right-hand side of the road and be very aware of fast traffic around you that may even hit you (happened at least three times, once even caught on film). Cars hit your handle bars and send you flying (BTW I wore a bike helmet). Or there’s that time someone opened a car door on a fellow bike courier roommate and the pointy end of the door ended up in his chest, sending him to the hospital.

In the Netherlands you can bike without fear of cars on the bigger bike paths, although racing scooters are the new danger. However, it is relatively safe for these kinds of bigger bikes, even on busy streets since so many people cycle in general and cars are more aware of cyclists. And traffic is much slower, too.

(Link: thenextweb.com, Photo: De Cafe Racer)

In March of this year the Jonker family of Kerkrade in Limburg seemed to have struck gold when father Jos (47) reached sixth place in an online poker tournament, netting him a cool 370,000 euro. The happy story turned sour quickly when 17 year old son Jimmy was found boasting in online forums that it was him that had been playing the finals, drawing the attention of organisers PokerStars.

Yesterday PokerStars decided that since it was against the rules for the underaged to play, it would not pay out the sum to either of the Jonkers, opting instead to donate the prize to an organisation that tries to promote responsible gambling by battling, amongst others, gambling by the underaged, AD reports.

Jimmy Jonker had been participating in the tournament using his father’s account, and the handle Zeurrr (Whiiine). The Jonker family refused to comment to the newspaper.

The Sunday Million tournament had almost 60,000 people compete for 11,825,600 US dollar in prizes.

(Link: PokerStrategy.com. Photo by Jam Adams, some rights reserved.)

I grew up in Blerick, a town with a town hall but without the political body to inhabit it. See, in 1940 the town was added to the neighbouring city of Venlo by the Nazi occupier, which made the possession of a town hall moot.

Interestingly the previous municipality that Blerick belonged to, Maasbree, once had three different town halls, and the council would rotate among them until in 1904 the Blerick town hall was made the permanent one.

In celebration of Liberation day, daily De Pers summed up 6 of the changes the Nazis made that stuck:

1. Child support (the Nazis wanted the Arian race to flourish)
2. Corporate tax (funnily enough, these days our low corporate taxes make us a tax haven, according to the Berserker of Abbottabad)
3. Central European Time (before that, we had our own sliver of a time zone)
4. The Frisian islands of Vlieland and Terschelling (formerly of Noord Holland)
5. Rent control and renter protection (including the right to live in a house forever)
6. Job protection (including the right to keep a job forever)

In a number of these cases the occupier made into law what was already on the books. In other cases the law was kept because it made sense. For instance, with housing shortages being rather prominent after the war, it made eminent sense to protect renters from price gouging. In such cases the Germans had unwittingly produced both the diseases and the cures.

(Photo of the Blerick town hall by Wikimedia user Torval, some rights reserved)

The amount of children under the age of 18 in psychotherapy has increased by 50% in two years, Volkskrant reports. The paper writes that “insurers such as CZ and Achmea” have noticed the trend.

Volkskrant further quotes an unknown quantity of unnamed sellers of therapy, the child therapists, as saying that children haven’t gotten any crazier in the past two years—it’s the parents who have gotten over their reluctance to seek help for their kids.

You’d better read the article yourself (Dutch) to see if you can discover anything resembling reporting in it.

See also: Dutch children could not be any happier

HEMA, a popular Dutch chain store, has set up a website encouraging children to share their exam cheating tips, as a way to draw attention to their back to school products. The smarty pants who send in tips get a free invisible ink pen.

According to Bizz.nl, some 18,000 (!) kids have already left tips. Now all teachers have to learn these tips by heart during their vacation, the article jokes.

Teachers are pissed at Hema, while the folks at HEMA don’t think it’s a big deal. In the past HEMA has had a Top 5 of most stolen products campaign, showing they have a good sense of humour.

One of the comments reads “Let’s hope that the students make the grade this way since working at HEMA is probably what they’ll end up doing later.”

(Link: bizz.nl, Photo by Hans Vandenbogaerde, some rights reserved)

An eensie-weensie spider startled a 43-year-old woman from Oostvoorne so much last Monday that she drove her car onto the shoulder of the road, upon which the vehicle made a double somersault and landed on the other side of the road.

The woman and her children of seven and nine got out the car unharmed, Trouw reports. This took place on the Schrijversdijk (‘writer’s dike’) in Brielle, and the time was 9.45 a.m.

No one knows what happened to the spider.

(Via Moors Magazine)