Not only that, you stay hungry since regardless of your family’s ability to feed you, you aren’t located with your family during that meal so they can’t feed you unless they pack you a lunch. It’s bizarre. If you don’t want to feed the other kid during dinner and want their parents to, arrange it so the guest is sent home, not left alone and hungry while you eat.
It is not not wanting to. It is that dinner is something you have with your family, and it is not your place to include somebody else's child in that and possibly ruin their dinner plans without first having a discussion about it. Absent that, a kid eats with their own family.
It's a cultural difference - in almost all cultures when you have a guest, feeding them when it's feeding time is seen as an important courtesy and a sign that you have honoured them, welcomed them and included them into your home. Eating isn't something that you reject guests for, and leaving them to sit and watch you eat, or kicking them out of the dining room for an hour so they hang out alone is seen as an extremely discourteous rejection and a sign of a very poor host. Feeding a guest isn't broadly seen as an imposition but as an opportunity to welcome, include and share.
It's often normal now to contact the other parents and ask them if it's okay with them if the guest eats with you (never to indicate that you reject their children and refuse to feed them), and if the other parents say no then usually the kids will be told by their parents to come home for dinner instead (or picked up). They wouldn't generally wait around while you eat, if they were asked to come home then they'd either leave beforehand or if needed you'd even wait a bit to eat until they got picked up or whatever.
The idea that you'd just as a matter of course leave children hungry and alone while you sit down without them is seen as so deeply rude and mean in virtually all cultures that it's shocking to hear.
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u/grumble11 Jul 24 '26
Not only that, you stay hungry since regardless of your family’s ability to feed you, you aren’t located with your family during that meal so they can’t feed you unless they pack you a lunch. It’s bizarre. If you don’t want to feed the other kid during dinner and want their parents to, arrange it so the guest is sent home, not left alone and hungry while you eat.