Here’s an alternate scenario that I haven’t seen mentioned since the start of this whole Sweden-gate. In my experience (in Poland), you wouldn’t offer the child visitor a seat at the family table, presumably because that’s awkward for both the family and the child. Instead, it is the host child who would take their plate and optionally another plate or snack for their guest into their own room.
I was a really picky child, so my experience might be skewed by usually just refusing unfamiliar food. I remember having a piece of dry bread (that I asked for) while my friend ate their meal. I may have sat in my friend’s room alone while they ate with their family. No big deal; at that age food was either fuel or gross, just an unwelcome break from playing.
A vastly more important rule was to keep your friends in your room and away from family. I almost never saw my friends’ parents. My dearest teenage friend, whom I visited all the time, including overnight, had three brothers and I only ever talked to one of them. I never saw her father, and never said more than hello to the mother. (And yet she somehow sensed there was lesbian activity going on, and eventually banned me from visiting.)
In case of a sleepover or “dinner party” just for kids/teenagers, the family would have eaten separately and left the kitchen to the kids, followed by the same at breakfast time.
To be clear, food and drink was always offered, but it was normal to refuse, and in fact acceptance of someone’s weirdness around meals was more of a mark of a good host - only towards children, though. Once you turned 18, the pressure to eat in groups and enjoy it came crashing down.
Seems strange to me, too. I mean , I had lots of friends whose parents I never met - but that was in high school and I was never at those friends’ houses. The friends whose houses I was at all the time - I knew their parents , siblings and sometimes their aunts/uncles/cousins.
Yeah, if I was a visitor in the house for the first time, at least the mother would definitely make herself acquainted with me. And if we were, say, watching TV, we would often interact with other members of the family.
My parents most certainly met and talked to anybody who came into our house. If anybody who I brought home had been reluctant to meet or talk with them, that would have been considered both rude and a huge red flag; though of course my friends and I could and did go off and have separate conversations away from the adults.
And I met and talked to all of their friends; even when I was very young. When I was young I’d be sent up to bed while the party was still going; and if there were other children over, we might go off to another room than the grownups were in, or I might on my own if I found the conversation boring; but we all ate at the same dinner table, and I was often in the living room after dinner while guests were there.
It’s really interesting to read about a culture doing it differently. @Esturionette, were parents not concerned at all about who their children were hanging out with? Was it assumed that anyone in the same general age group would be a good companion?
That’s interesting. I remember almost always being eager for meals, and have certainly been around other young children who were. Do you think that’s an individual difference, or societally encouraged?
Is that true? I would be surprised to learn that in any culture having guests share your table would be considered awkward. I mean, that’s like the fundamental human act of hosting a guest–inviting them to your table. Having someone share your bread is a basic metaphor for hosting a guest in English, and I would imagine there are similar metaphors in most languages.
Again, though, rules can be different for children, though of course IAN Esturionette and cannot speak for her. Hospitality towards guests can be kind of orthogonal to toleration of kiddies in adult-dominated spaces.
I can see how in some cultures one might freely offer hospitality to visiting adults, possibly with their children in tow, but still not choose to saddle an unaccompanied visiting child with the responsibility of “guest manners” at the family dinner table. Proper table etiquette used to be a fairly formidable skillset, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable that for a child visitor flying solo it could be quite an ordeal.
Besides, even if an unaccompanied child visitor has all the dinner-table manners down pat, what are you going to talk to them about? You can’t just completely ignore them, but it’s not as though they’re going to be able to make civilized conversation about the news of the day and items of intellectual interest (trying to channel a somewhat old-fashioned adult perspective here).
From that perspective, unaccompanied child visitors are in a sort of weird limbo where they’re not quite up to the responsibilities of being full-rank invited dinner guests, but you can’t just treat them on the same footing as your own kids without potentially slighting their family and upbringing. In the modern American system where adults (not unreasonably) expect to tolerate a great deal of childish behavior from children in a family setting, this isn’t an issue. But in social systems where attitudes toward children’s conduct are (or were) a bit more formal and stern, it might be.
This is baffling. This is your own child’s friend. This is someone in your social circle. Indeed, when I was growing up, part of learning how to interact with people depended upon being thrown into such situations and learning by observing and doing. You would have to have a very dim opinion of your child’s friend’s parents to be so fearful of introducing a disruptive barbarian to your dinner. I mean, really, what kind of culture is so isolated from household to household that you can’t imagine including someone who is in your own child’s social circle into a perfectly normal routine?
I just bet that Swedes are perfectly capable of doing this.
Seriously? We are talking about a family dinner, not a banquet of Nobel laureates an Peers of the Realm. What parent draws back in fear from having to have a social interaction with the friend of a family member? That’s part of being a functioning adult in society.
But seriously, I’m not saying that there’s anything in the least wrong with your position on family interactions with unaccompanied child visitors. I’m just saying that even my own dim childhood memories of some slightly starchy mid-20th-century family dinner settings (although not so much in my own immediate family) give me what I believe may be some insight into a cultural mindset where it wouldn’t be considered necessary or appropriate to include an unaccompanied visiting child at the family dinner table.
I can tell this is very foreign to you, but IIRC there was definitely no “fear” about it. It was more about remnants of earlier much stricter attitudes along the lines of “Children should be seen and not heard”.
Here’s an example for you of those earlier attitudes in the full vigor of their Victorian heyday, from Clarence Day’s 1937 memoir Life with Mother:
If that shocks you too unutterably, hang on, I think I may have Great-Grandma’s old bottle of smelling salts around here somewhere.
You’re citing to upper class habits in the Victorian Era?
Either way, they fed their own children. And a household like that feeds all kinds of other people too, including guests, servants, and retainers.
If they avoided dining with their own children based on such fears, then they could still arrange to have a visiting child fed alongside in whatever arrangement they made for their own children. And I’m sure they did.
If they dined with their own children, then I’m sure that the kinds of children that they allowed their children to associate with would be expected to model the same kind of behavior, whether it was to keep quiet or whatever.
And anyway we are clearly talking about more recent history than that. I’m sorry, I’m just not buying that your average Swedish adult would actually find it so awkward to discover a visiting minor at dinner so as to have no other option than to let a kid hang around but unwelcome to join the family at dinner.
Either way, only a fraction of society was so wealthy as to be able to completely isolate themselves from their own and other people’s children.
Look. What happened here is that Esturionette offered some anecdotes of her own experience in Poland, I’m not sure how recently but I’m presuming within the last few decades:
You then directly challenged the accuracy of her account with the query:
All I’ve been trying to do since then is give some impressions from my own (admittedly very different, and not at all Polish) experience that make this account seem less incredible and incomprehensible to me than it obviously does to you. Because I was under the impression that you wanted to understand how such a cultural mindset might work and how a situation like that might actually occur in a family setting.
If all you want to do is nitpick those impressions to keep reiterating how distasteful and antisocial and implausible you consider such a mindset to be, I’ll cheerfully bow out and let Esturionette take over the dispute with you about whether or not she’s truthfully representing her own childhood experience.
I’ll say that in a Polish-American family (with the adults all from Poland, children mostly born in the US), at large family parties it was typical to not have the kids hang around the adult table, but I feel like it was more that the kids simply didn’t want to hang around there, anyway. At smaller dinner parties I’ve been to, kids did sit at the main dinner table.
But this isn’t really any different than the idea of a “kids table” at American parties.
Swedish media people have had various slants on this. A food writer claimed that the phenomenon is about Swedes having modest eating habits: what is good enough for them to eat in their homes is not considered good enough to offer to guests. One commentator in Dagens Nyheter, one of Sweden’s big papers, suggested that it’s because Swedes are “a little stingy, and perhaps don’t have great social skills.”
A Norwegian friend who, like most Norwegian people, believes Swedes to be some of the strangest people walking the earth, said that he thinks it’s a case of not wanting to incur obligation for the other party to return the favor. So if you feed someone in your house, the implication is that you’re asking to be fed at theirs. This adds up: When I lived in Sweden, I spent a lot of time trying to buy people rounds of drinks and being confused by their distress. People would try to pay me back immediately, by bank transfer.
That’s a really interesting example of the kind of unspoken underlying assumptions at play. It reminds me a little bit of when I was dating, and didn’t feel comfortable with a guy paying for everything. If he paid for dinner, I’d want to at least get the movie tickets. If there was no movie, I was maybe OK with it if I liked him enough to go out with him again, because I could treat him next time. But if I didn’t want to see him again, I would usually insist on splitting the check. I’ve also never let a stranger buy me a drink in a bar. It just feels too much like I’m agreeing to a contract for which the terms are not clearly spelled out but certainly involve paying him some amount of attention, quite possibly more than I’ll want to as soon as he opens his mouth. I’d rather take the drink out of the equation and have him just talk to me, and I’ll decide if I’m interested enough to engage, without owing him any special consideration. This refusal is not a cultural thing; as far as I know, it’s just a weird me thing. But I don’t think I’m imagining the underlying fact that a guy who buys dinner or drinks for a woman expects something in return.
I don’t think that what you have described is all that uncommon in dating situations, but it doesn’t seem to me that it relates to the situations here. Unless think that by accepting a friend’s hospitality, Swedes fear creating the impression that they might owe sex in return?
I don’t think it’s just you; I think quite a few women react like that.
But I don’t know whether @Acsenray was describing trying to buy drinks for a specific woman, or a specific person; or whether they were trying to buy a round of drinks for the entire barful, or for, say, a particular table or group of friends. That doesn’t to me carry the same connotations.
Please observe that this is not something I said. This is something I quoted from the article linked in my post.
Also, it’s clear from the context of the article that the writer is talking about a round of drinks for a group, not trying to buy drinks for a stranger at a bar or a date.
