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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   4253 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 26, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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It’s like that funny /r/Europe thing recently where the Scandinavians all said it would be weird to offer your kid’s friends who came to play after school dinner, because the custom is that the child should go home for food.

Surely that’s true in America as well, right? Or is this an area where Midwestern Germans and Scandinavians have retained something of their ancestral culture? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of people serving dinner to their kids’ friends.

You mean you’d feed him yourself and deprive his family of family dinner? Barbarism! Once dinner is ready, that’s the signal for your child’s friend to go home. Now, there are exceptions, of course, if you’ve previously made arrangements with the kid’s parents to serve him dinner at your house—say after a game or something. Also, on reflection, I think the lower and lower middle class kids were (and presumably still are) more likely to eat dinner at their friends’ houses. But not, in my experience, the middle middle class kids. They’ll just get snacks if they’re lucky. I should clarify that I’m speaking from a rural/very small town Midwest perspective. Things are probably different in the cities.

It depends on the circumstance of the invitation. If you live in a neighborhood where kids are in and out of each other's houses every day after school, then no, it wouldn't be customary to offer the friend dinner, though it wouldn't be unheard of. However, it's also pretty common to invite a friend over with the specific intention of serving dinner, the same as if you'd invited any other guest over for dinner.

In Sweden they will apparently eat dinner while the guest child is still in the house, which is beyond the pale IME in America (or among my Russian family). That's different from having kids go home to eat at a certain time.

Oh, I agree that that would be a step too far.

Interesting. If I went to a friend’s after school it was always assumed I was staying for dinner and would be picked up afterwards at 8 or 9 (after my parents had eaten), not before.

There were three kids in our house and it was very normal to have 1-2 (or more on Fridays) friends of mine or my siblings over for dinner pretty much every weekday.

In Australia it's weird if you don't feed your kids' friends, and the same was true when I was a kid in the States, although that was back in the late eighties/early nineties. But yeah one of my early memories is of my parents scoffing at my friend's parents on the ride home for being too poor to make me a sandwich or something.

If you don’t mind my asking, whereabouts did you grow up in the States? I’m a bit younger than you, but I also know that my parents never ate dinner at their friends’ houses growing up either. When my dad was young, one of my grandma’s neighbors would ring a farm bell when it was getting close to supper, which was the signal for all the kids in the neighborhood to go home.

Tennessee. Your experience kind of reminds me of when we'd visit my grandparents though, but there my grandma rang the bell to let anyone on the property know it was time to come in for dinner. But now my confidence is shot, so maybe that was to do with her Italianness.

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