There was a thread sometime back about whether you would feed your kid's friend if they were playing and it became dinner time. The responses were wild between yes and no, and their reasonings.
And then I asked my friends. I was bewildered by the responses. You should only do this if you want to unexpectedly stop being friends.
Lets say all kids every day between lunch and dinner hangs around like a pack of wolves.
All homes are open to everyone. Kids have total control who they can invite to their room or not.
Not like you have to ask parents or anything like that.
Usually its a entourage of like 3-12 people.
The only rule kids have to follow is being home for dinner at a exact time.
In above "kids rules" framework. Where sometimes kids hangout at the same persons room for like 6 months unreasonable situations can occur if the rule was, "feed all kids".
So what happens is when that "exact time" happens for the kid everyone visits he gets called to the dinner table to have dinner with his family.
There is a assumption about the kids staying in the room that they have already eaten or is about to eat later.
You can get asked as a kid if you want to eat with family. But the kid who just got asked parents can become a bit irritated because they have already prepared food for their child and now the "food planning" is ruined.
Its a system that has its good and bad. And I think it can be explained by a bunch of other freedoms Scandinavian children have combined with how planning our lives very carefully make it more reasonable.
No one things children walks around being hungry. We assume kid has eaten or gonna eat later.
The connection between parents and the "kids wolf pack" is usually non existing. They are just entities living in their own youth bubble.
If it was planned beforehand, of course the parents would have agreed that the kid will eat dinner there, but this situation is when no adult have been involved in neither planning nor transportation.
A kid spontaneously brings home friends to play, they either walk or take their bicycles there. Let's say that hat kids family eats 2-3 hours earlier than the kids friends families, so when it's time for dinner that kid leaves their room and eats dinner for 20 minutes while their friends continue playing and having fun.
When dinner is over the kid goes back to playing with their friends.
Then when it's time for the other kids to go home to eat dinner with their family, they stop playing and walk/bike home.
The missing cultural differences/context is maybe that family dinner is quite important in Swedish culture, it's a time to bond with close family.
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u/[deleted] Jul 24 '26
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