...If she was not allowed to order or have an appetizer, then Mom could have spoken up then and told her no....If the mom knows, say daughter will eat an appetizer and not her meal thus wasting food, then the mother tells the daughter beforehand what the expectations of the meal and ordering will be...not just arbitrarily offering the food she obviously had permission to order for herself to others...
A lot of posters keep bringing up that the mom should have said something beforehand.
Its the child's
mother. Surely they have had hundreds of thousands of conversations about food prior to this outing. The mother very well could be operating under the impression that her daughter is old enough and smart enough to not need to be told one million and one times that she needs to share, that having been told so at every meal prior to this was sufficient prior warning of what the family's expectations are.
Not to pick on you inviteseller, as many have posted similar thoughts, but as an example didn't you just last week post a thread about your 17 year old daughter and her guest ordering their own food knowing full well you were cooking them dinner? And when you asked your daughter about it - because you expected she should have known better from all your years of raising her - she basically shrugged and said she thought it wouldn't be a big deal? You, in that thread, very clearly expressed that you didn't think your daughter should have had to been expressly told of the meal expectations in your family for that evening, as you felt the little you did say about it being taco night should have been clear enough based on the norms of your household for her to know what was expected. You expected your daughter
to just know, without it being spelled out for her.
Without knowing what the expectations in that family are regarding appetizers, I don't think any of us can say the mother was rude. As many posters have pointed out, they come from families where sharing appetizers would be an unspoken expectation.
And considering its the OP's friend, and there didn't seem to be any other indications of lack of manners, I think we should assume the mom wasn't being rude, she was simply re-enforcing a family norm.