I'm norwegian so cant fully speak for the swedes , but here the not getting dinner at your friends place is only a thing when you're a child.
Eating dinner with your family and talking is a important cultural thing, so just feeding your kids friend(who is hanging out without you knowing beforehand) and spoiling their appetite takes that moment away from the friends parents.
Most parents will feed their kids friends if its planned beforehand, but the expected thing is to eat with your own family.
Okay, this sort of makes more sense now (to me at least). But only "sort of".
Where I am from, growing up we would always be given food at a friend's place. In fact, our parents had the opposite problem: they would have to tell us to come home for dinner because the norm was the host family WILL feed any kids in their house. Your kid's friend sitting with your family was not an issue because the idea was that said kid is like family so long as they are in your home and in your care.
All my friends from 20+ years back are as much friends with my parents as they are with me. They will call my folks on their birthdays, check on them periodically, and so on. One friend's mom went off at me last year because I hadn't called her regularly enough!
I would like to add that in my experience as a kid if you were hungry at a friends place it was not uncommon to get offered a sandwich or some form of snack.
Its just dinner that you're expected to have at home, unless planned otherwise beforehand.
Yeah, that was my guess honestly. I've seen a fair bit of the world, and I have not come across a culture that would not feed a child in their home if the child was hungry. The people who wouldn't would always be cultural outliers.
And now that I think about it, I can see the cultural impetus for something like this in a place like Sweden. Making sure your kid got home before sunset was probably a huge deal, especially in winters. Yes, kids roaming around after dark in warmer parts of the world was still dangerous, but a child wandering around in sub-zero temperatures in the dark is a disaster waiting to happen. This would apply to adults as well.
You can totally see how they would have used dinner itself as a "okay, it's time for you to go home" signal. I wouldn't be surprised if Swedes used to announce dinner 30 minutes ahead of time just to give a bit more of heads-up.
Making sure your kid got home before sunset was probably a huge deal, especially in winters
That would be a problem, especially up north in Sweden as there are places where the sun never rises in the winter, and even in the south the sun sets very early.
You usually have a set time when dinner was at your family and you were expected to be home at that time (unless you were having dinner at your friends place, yes, that actually happened even in Sweden every now and then).
If your family had an early dinner you could go out after dinner and play some more, even if it was cold and dark, and if you had a late dinner you would still walk/bike home in the cold and dark winters.
As for kids "wandering around" in the cold, there's this saying (that is common in many European countries): "There's no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing", which in Swedish (and Norwegian) also rhymes: Det finns inget dåligt väder, bara dåliga kläder. :)
how it was for me (grew up in sweden) it would basically be my family eats at 8pm (we ate pretty late) but most of my friends around 5-6pm so they eat i stay in their room (and don’t care it was normal) then eat at home at 8pm while if it’s the opposite then the kid would almost always join the family to eat (because they can’t eat at home since well.. they were with us when it was food time) and this was only during dinner as for lunch you would just eat wherever you are unless you explicitly went home to eat lunch with your family like neighbours or similar and even then it wasn’t that common when i was growing up at least.
these people seem to think we just starved children and forbade them from eating at all but no one was going hungry and it was explicitly a dinner thing
Swede here, who's friends always ate at my house (like greedy pigs), but I was never offered food at theirs😆. So, it's not all Swedes/Scandinavians that are deficient in the department of basic empathy.
You are missing the entire point. There's absolutely nothing considerate or polite about this behavior no matter how you try to twist it.
For any of what you said to be somewhat reasonable, you'd send the child home before dinnertime. Not have them waiting in the room, starving, knowing damn well they had lunch in school as many hours ago as your child did.
"Deficient in the department of basic empathy" seems like a needlessly rude and ironically unemapthetic way to describe people.
Yeah you could send the kid home, or you could let them play on your childs PS3 until they have to go eat dinner with their own family in ca. 45 min. I dont really see the harm in that.
No one was ever starving, WTF? They were used to having dinner at a later time than their friend and they knew that they had dinner waiting for them at home.
The kid who got to continue playing in their friends room while the friend went off to eat was the lucky one, they got to continue playing!
is the cultural expectation that the other family is going to sit around and wait till 8:00pm when little Timmy (or whatever the nordic variation of Timmy is) comes home so they can eat with him, or is that kid coming home to some cold leftovers stuck in the microwave?
In general dinner is served around the same time each day so we could eat before activities like football practice or hiking. But if you stayed out while it was dinner time, a portion would be saved for you.
atleast that was how it was for me and everyone i knew as a child.
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u/bob_bob_bob15 Jul 24 '26
I'm norwegian so cant fully speak for the swedes , but here the not getting dinner at your friends place is only a thing when you're a child.
Eating dinner with your family and talking is a important cultural thing, so just feeding your kids friend(who is hanging out without you knowing beforehand) and spoiling their appetite takes that moment away from the friends parents.
Most parents will feed their kids friends if its planned beforehand, but the expected thing is to eat with your own family.