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With Thanksgiving just around the corner, this is a great time to teach kids the art of making conversation at the dinner table. In this show, I focus on grown-ups making conversation with children or teenagers, but these tips apply equally to conversations with just about anybody.
I cover three basic rules for making great conversation. Here’s an overview:
1. Allow time for real conversation to unfold.
Kids won’t learn how to be great conversationalists by taking a class. They learn it by doing with real people, especially their families. So it’s important that we have some dinners where we don’t have something urgent to do afterward.
2. Take an interest in the other person.
The most important element in great table conversation isn’t the talking: it’s the listening. Be curious about what your kids are saying. Give them your eyes when they’re making a point, and then repeat back what they say to ensure you understand.
3. Prepare conversation starters ahead of time.
Conversations starters are tools you can use to prime the conversational pump. I offer some ideas, including purchased “table topic” card decks, reading a newspaper article aloud, a saint’s biography, or a poem. You can turn conversation starters into a family ritual.
Resources
A Calendar of Saints by James Bentley. This is the book of short saints biographies that I mentioned on the show.
Free Conversation Starters. List of questions from a Catholic website. You can print this out, cut up the questions into strips, and place them in a basket.
More Free Conversation Starters from Loyola Press. For this one, you click a button to see the question. If you don’t allow phones at the table (you wise one) you can just look at the question yourself before dinner, and then pose the question for discussion.
Our Moments: Kids card deck. We own this deck. Includes some common ones like “If you could play any instrument what would it be?,” but also some intriguing ones like “Do adults automatically deserve respect? How do you earn respect?
Friendly Defenders cards. I’ve used these at lunch time with my kids.