I’m starting to reconnect with some of my old friends from high school but they have a 5-year-old now and I want to make a good impression but I don’t really know how to interact with children. Do I just like ask them what their favorite Disney movie is or something?
Kids have always loved me, had no idea why, not much love for them. Asked my ex-wife why they latch onto me when I often get annoyed with them.
“You talk to them like adults. You don’t condescend and treat them like they’re stupid, not afraid to use a strong vocabulary. No one else does that so they respond to the heightened respect.”
I still use “big” words with them, but my own kids taught me to occasionally stop and ask, “Know what $X means?”, then give a short answer and flow right back to where I was. In no case will I baby talk 'em, but you gotta realize, they’ll pretend to understand a thing to keep the conversation going. They’re having a blast being respected in such an unusual manner and don’t want to derail the conversation.
As an example, don’t say, “Oh! Do you like STAR WARS? It’s really neato isn’t it? When I was a little boy, I loved Star Wars! Isn’t Darth Vader cool and scary?!”
Say instead, “Star Wars fan, huh? Seen Rogue One yet? That one jacked me up, wow. What did you think?” And then carry on (mostly) like you’re shooting the shit with a friend.
(Hope that example comes across, it’s not a thing I think about, just comes naturally.)
Kinda like how I learned to talk to girls in high school. Holy shit that turned out easy! Instead of treating them as beautiful, strange and untouchable creatures, putting them on a pedestal, talk to them just like your guy friends. With the other guys bumble fucking around trying to figure out what to say to be attractive and not offend, you really stand out.
Turns out people react well to be treated as equals. Who would have thought!
That’s good advice. Shame I’m shit at small talk at a fundamental level, but she likes bluey, maybe I could ask if she saw the episode where they were doing pots and pans as helmets or something
Ask her what her favourite episode is. Once you get small kids talking, it’s actually great, they tell such great stories.
Share (age appropriate of course) opinions of your own along the way. Like, don’t just say “have you seen [episode with pots and pans]”, expand it by saying stuff like you’ve not seen much Bluey, but you have seen the one with the pots and pans — does she know the one you mean? I suggest this because kids are actually pretty socially adept and I’ve found myself in analogous situations where I caused confusion by mentioning something I barely knew and the kid reasonably interpreted this as “this person wants to talk about this thing”, and then when I didn’t seem to know anything about the topic I had suggested, the kid seemed pretty thrown off and uncertain how to respond.
Or completely open ended questions, like “I know you like Bluey, but I’ve never seen it before. What’s your favourite episode?”, which could lead into asking for more details on what happened in that particular episode and why she likes it.
The thing about small talk is that I’ve found there’s a distinction between being good at it, and enjoying it. I used to think I was awful at smalltalk, before I realised that actually, I just didn’t find it enjoyable. I think to some extent, the point isn’t to enjoy it, but to build a conversational back and forth rally which builds initial rapport to figure out what common ground exists between two people (which can lead to more enjoyable proper conversation). Some people do enjoy small talk though. The rally model was useful for me because it underscored how I need to serve the other person options to hit back with.
For example, most kids go to school, so that’s a decent enough topic for if you’re running out of ideas. With kids, you can get away with clunky conversation starters like “What’s your favourite subject at school?”. Better than that though is something like “My favourite subject at school is science, what’s yours?” because it gives your conversation partner the option of responding either to your statement (such as with “ugh, I hate science, [teacher] is so mean!”), or your question, and having multiple options to hit back with allows for flow to help. Once you hit on a topic the kid is excited to talk about, you’re golden: just keep being interested in their perspective and give bits of your own perspective so they don’t feel like they’re being interrogated.
Edit: This was a great question, btw OP — It’s led to a lot of interesting discussion, thanks for asking it