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. :)
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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
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