Can anyone recommend any good books on the art of good conversation? Or how to hold conversations with children beyond "how was your day?" "what did you do at school?" kind of stuff?
I've always felt conversationally broken. I'm terrible at interacting with people face-to-face. I find it hard to maintain focus on what someone is saying rather than drifting off thinking about other things (often, what the conversational topic and style reveals about the other person), my mind goes blank when it's my turn to say anything, I'm always worried about putting my foot in it - and often do put my foot in it when I feel confident enough to talk about anything.
I didn't learn how to do conversation from my parents - their style of interaction is completely non-reciprocal. They tell you some stuff, don't wait for you to say anything, then tell you some more stuff, ad infinitum until they complain that you're "hard work" because you "never have anything to say". Often they're mansplaining topics that I've got a PhD on, or have spent most of my adult life doing/thinking about/reading about. Or they're having an argument with each other about some trivial set of details about something that it would be simple to just look up, but they think this constitutes social interaction so can't understand why i politely wait for them to finish. It's always been like this - as a small child I quickly learnt that if I tried to hold a conversation about something with a parent I'd get accused of "droning on about something that interests nobody", and so the done thing was to listen to what they had to say as t was clearly more important.
Obvs now i'm in my 40s this shouldn't have much effect as I am a fully-fledged adult, but it's sufficient background to explain why i just feel i have no idea what I'm doing. I also worry about how bad I am at it now that DS (age 2) is more and more chatty and I am in the territory where I should be showing him how to interact well, I should be asking him appropriately leading questions - and I am so definitely not... DH is a bit better at all that, but because I'm like a rabbit in the headlights (and often too tired to talk) at the dinner table, DH often just monologues about his own stuff, and DS isn't learning how adults hold good conversations.