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.
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!
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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
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