mōdgethanc wrote:linguoboy wrote:Are y'all keeping up with the latest cross-cultural Twitter phenom? Apparently someone posted about Swedish folks making guests stay alone in another room why the family ate a meal and the rest of the world is flipping out. I have to admit, while I can imagine a particular family or even a small subculture doing this, the idea that it's a general cultural expectation is just flabbergasting to me. As someone said in comments, in the American South, if you were invited into someone's house for whatever reason and they didn't offer you food and drink people would talk about you for *months*. About the only time something like this would be acceptable to us as Americans is if you had tradespeople in your home and even then you'd at least offer them some water to drink even if you didn't expect them to accept.
Yep, I read some of it and noted even the Swedes themselves disagreed on how widespread it is - some said that it's a norm (or was when they were kids at least) while others said that it's only a thing that a subset of the middle class does. The weird thing to me is why it would be only Sweden and not the other Nordic countries, unless they're in on it too.
The whole world seems to agree that this social norm sucks ass and is rude and mean. It's a damn kid. If they're at your home and it's dinnertime, you offer to let them stay, or else they go home. Making them sit alone in a room is something you do to
punish a kid. The hell?
The arguments I saw that were for this practice were mostly one of these:
1. Dinner is family time and it's sacred or something.
I think this is weak. The family is still there if someone joins them. The dynamic doesn't shift that much.
2. Families might not have enough to feed another kid.
This is also weak since again, I read this was a middle-class thing, not something poor families do. It's weird to me that families would only make enough food for themselves and no more. Leftovers are a thing.
3. It's understood that the kid would have dinner waiting at home for them and will go eat it at some point.
Alright, this one almost makes sense - but then why doesn't the kid go home? Why don't their parents come and pick them up? Why make this kid sit in a room? Baffling.
How this norm arose and why is the big question here. Nowhere else on earth seems to do it. Why Sweden?
1. and 3. actually tie together, it's not that your child's friend would disrupt your sacred family time, it's that you would deprive them of theirs if they had already eaten before you sent them home.
It seems to be an urban middle-class thing more than anything else, an environment where kids can and often do visit each other spontaneously and might even move between several friends' houses in an afternoon. In the countryside, things have always needed more planning just because of the distances involved, and children from poor families in towns and cities play outside the home since they live in apartments that aren't big enough to give them much privacy from their siblings.
It also has its roots in a time before cellphones, but perhaps more importantly: before microwaves. You didn't want to be stuck with too many leftovers since heating them up again might very well be impossible depending on the dish, and if you hadn't taken enough produce out of the freezer the day before or earlier that day, there simply wouldn't be enough food for an extra person.
As for why they weren't simply sent home, I honestly don't know. Maybe it was easier to wait in their friend's room for half an hour before you resumed playing until it was time to go home for their own dinner or something.
In any case, it's equally baffling to me, and I remember how mean it seemed when I first read about it in a book as a kid. Going home once dinnertime came around, sure, that was pretty normal, but staying in a friend's room just did not happen.
If someone still practices this, it has to be out of simple inertia, since like you say, there is absolutely no practical reason for it anymore.
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