What a Dutch baby needs

Every country hands new parents a slightly different list. This is the Dutch one, as we found it.

The paperwork

• Register the birth at the gemeente of the municipality where the baby was born, within three working days. Not where you live — where the birth happened. The child gets a BSN in the process, and almost nothing else can proceed without it.
• Add the baby to your health insurance within four months of birth. Cover is backdated to the day of birth, and children are insured free until eighteen. Do not let this one drift.
• Kindgebonden budget and kinderbijslag are handled through the Belastingdienst and the SVB. Kinderbijslag usually starts by itself once the registration goes through; the income-linked budget may need a claim.
• Childcare, if you will use it. Waiting lists in the Randstad are measured in quarters, not weeks. People sign up while pregnant. This is not an exaggeration.

Kraamzorg

For the first eight days or so, a kraamverzorgende comes to the house for several hours a day: checks on mother and baby, helps with feeding, watches for problems, and — a detail that surprises everyone from abroad — does some of the household work and looks after visitors. It is covered by basic insurance apart from a small hourly contribution, and it is arranged during pregnancy, not after.

It is, for our money, the single best thing about giving birth in this country.

The yellow booklet

At your first visit to the consultatiebureau you are given the Groeiboekje — the small yellow booklet. Growth curves, developmental checks, and the record of every vaccination go into it. Keep it. It travels with the child for years, it is what schools and doctors ask for, and it is a nuisance to reconstruct.

The consultatiebureau itself is free, routine, and thorough: regular weigh-ins, hearing and vision checks, the vaccination programme, and a place to ask small questions without booking a doctor.

The drops

Vitamin K and vitamin D, daily, from the first week. Every pharmacy sells them, nobody will remind you twice, and both matter. See our piece on medicine and small children.

What people here actually own

Less than the shops suggest. Our minimalist shopping list for newborns covers the general case; the Dutch-specific additions are short:

• A rain cover. For the pram, and later the bike seat. It rains sideways and life does not stop for it.
• A proper wind-and-rain suit once the baby is sitting up. Cheap ones wet through in twenty minutes.
• A bike solution, eventually — a front seat, a rear seat, or a bakfiets. Second-hand, always; the market is enormous and the prices new are not serious.
• A buggy that folds onto a train, because you will be doing that.
• Warm layers for outdoor naps. Babies here sleep outside, in the garden or on the balcony, in cold weather, deliberately. It works.

Everything else can wait until you know the child. Most of it can be borrowed.

This post is practical experience, not official guidance; rules and amounts change, so check the gemeente and Belastingdienst sites for the current version.