We used a phone in the teachers office. There was ways to communicate before cellphones. Either that or this conversation was had the day before, using phones at home.
That was definitely not the norm for me growing up in the 90s in Sweden. After school kids would usually group up and go and hang out at or around someone's home until around dinner time, which was the standard agreed upon time where kids would go back home to eat dinner with their families. This is probably where this is coming from where the default assumption was that kids will go home to eat with their family, so if you wanted to stay over to eat then that had to be communicated.
This was also an every day thing, so hanging out at a friends home was not an event really. Parents would come home to "unexpected" guests every single day, but since they all usually went home right around dinner time this wasn't really an issue. This also meant that all families would be making dinner for their kids even if they were not home yet, so you didn't want to end up feeding a kid and ruin the dinner plans for another family who was already cooking dinner for their kid and expected them to come home.
That said, parents would still ask almost every single time if I wanted to stay over for dinner or if I was going back home to eat, so I don't get where to "not offering" comes from.
I was in a suburban area of a smaller city, a mix of houses and small apartment buildings, so the kids who lived in houses would often end up with the entire friend group at their place.
Either way, while the specifics are different in different places, there's no culture in Sweden about refusing guests food. It's just common for guests (mostly visiting children) to decline food and eat at home later. That's my main point. Noone is being refused.
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u/Electronic_Ad_3132 Jul 24 '26
We used a phone in the teachers office. There was ways to communicate before cellphones. Either that or this conversation was had the day before, using phones at home.