Fair warning: this got long
I agree that Torbjörn is both condescending and dismissive of Emil
Oh, wow. So here we have more evidence that the Vasterstrom family just seems to have an all-around history of bad parenting. 
I find the dynamic between Emil and Torbjörn really interesting actually. In a way, one could view Torbjörn as an example of what Emil
could have become, had the family finances not gone completely to hell. As a skald, he's clearly been educated, but unlike his wife he lacks any "hard" scientific skills and when it comes time for him to enter the workforce, he's unable to find a job that requires much more than basic literacy and typing skills. It's not unreasonable to guess that like Emil, Torbjörn had access to a fancy education from an early age but wasn't forced into any subject he didn't excel at. While he does know Icelandic, it's not clear whether he was made to learn that as a requirement or whether he was inherently good at language, which wouldn't be surprising for someone who naturally learns toward skald work.
I also think that Torbjörn's character implies a lot about Emil's own family dynamic. At 38, Torbjörn is only nineteen years older than his nephew. If we assume that Torbjörn and Emil's father don't have too many other siblings—which would be unlikely, since children of small families tend to have small families in turn and the prologue Vasterstrom's had only one child, low birth rate among Scandinavians notwithstanding—and that the two of them didn't have an inordinately large age gap between them, then Emil's father was probably in his early to mid-twenties when Emil was born (I'm not even going to go into the possibility that Torbjörn is the older sibling.)
From what I know from studying population demographics for my degree (Environmental Science, IR), while it's not uncommon for people of the middle economic classes and below to have children at this age, wealthier and more educated people tend to wait a longer time to reproduce. This is partially because they simply have better access to birth control and family planning services, but also largely because if you have enough money to pursue higher education, which the Vasterstroms clearly do, then at 24-27 you're fresh out of college and just getting into the swing of adult life. Most people want to wait until they're sure they know that they're capable of taking care of themselves and have a steady relationship before adding kids to the mix. Waiting until you're 30-35, like Torbjörn did, is much more common.
However, in my own experience, (and we're gonna be really blunt here, forgive me guys) the majority of wealthy young adults that
do choose to have children straight out of university tend to have a similar mindset to each other, which is somewhere along the lines of, "okay, I'm done with college, I'm an Adult, time to settle down and have kids," and their children seem to become an accessory to substantiate their own adulthood, not least to themselves. I'm not saying that young rich parents don't love their kids, because they do, and sometimes they are very good parents. But from what I personally have seen, they usually have children before fully understanding the responsibility they are taking on, and as a result either spoil their kids or pawn them off on teachers, babysitters, and older family members so that they don't have to deal with them all the time. Which seems a lot like what Emil's parents did.
Now I know that's a
bit of headcannon. Maybe Torbjörn and Emil's dad did come from a large family and/or have a significant difference in age, and maybe Emil's parents were old enough to understand the responsibility of having children and were flawed in other ways; knowing as little about his family as we do, it's impossible to say. Maybe Minna just chose an age for Torbjörn that would put him in the "old enough to be Emil's uncle but young enough not to be the Old Character" category, but I do think that it would be interesting if Emil was the child of young parents who just didn't know what to do with the responsibility of actually caring for him.
Edit: please don't take this the wrong way if you are/have young wealthy parents, I know there's
a lot of generalization in this and I didn't mean to offend anyone.
