Some families didn't feed their kids' friends -- but Swedes say it's not like that anymore.
Since that post eight days ago, more than 16,000 people have responded, many offering tales of removing shoes or saying an unfamiliar grace. But one comment got particularly noticed. “I remember going to my swedish friends house,” a commenter recalled. “And while we were playing in his room, his mom yelled that dinner was ready. And check this. He told me to WAIT in his room while they ate.”Others chimed in with similar stories, or secondhand ones, about guests denied food at Swedish homes.
Tindre said he wasn’t sure of the origins, but he speculated that it might have something to do with his sense that Swedish families are often more likely to gather regularly with their immediate families, rather than extended ones. Tellström echoed that, explaining that because of consolidating farmlands beginning in the late 1700s and urbanization, families often lived apart from their relatives.
The tradition — wherever it might have existed — died out, Tellström says, because of the changing way that children are treated. Previous generations of Swedes typically considered children very different from adults. “Children were considered to be living almost in a parallel world,” he says. “Children were children, and parents and grown-ups were in their own sphere.
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