best way to initiate conversation with five year old son

Question

My son's mother and I have a hard time getting our five year old son to respond to any type of questions. Whether that be about his day, how he's feeling, what he's interested in, when asked directly about these things, he will choose not to answer. What is the best way to teach your child the skills necessary for general conversation? Or what is the best way to initiate a conversation with them to have them engaged?

Answer 1

The best way to get your son to respond to questions of this nature is to wait until he is about 25, and then just ask him. That's about when, in my experience, many children actually are willing to answer questions freely :)

However, assuming you are hoping to get some answers now, my suggestion is to follow the child. This means initiating conversations that he is interested in having, not ones you are interested in having.

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How was your day at school?

Boring.

What are you interested in?

I'd think you'd know that already?

How are you feeling?

How should I know? I'm five! Go away, you're boring.

Remind me, what does a Creeper do in Minecraft?

Everyone knows a creeper blows up when you get close to it. How could you not remember that?

Oh, right, they blow up. So you should make sure to build a trench around creepers to keep them out, right?

Uh, sure, if you're boring. I'm building this house, it's fifteen blocks high!! I can barely count to fifteen, but you can bet I'm counting these blocks. It has windows on EVERY side, and it has five doors, but you shouldn't use this door because it's the TRAPPED door, if you open it it will BLOW UP, that's just to keep the pillagers out when there's a pillager raid. Did you see the pillager raid I just did yesterday? I got a DIAMOND SWORD from it, oh yes it is an awesome sword it is BLUE and it can kill a spider in TWO HITS, and then there were SEVEN emeralds and these cool boots, and then after the pillager raid I played with my mod Minecon Earth and it was awesome, it has PLANETS that you can FLY between and my house on the biggest planet has SEVEN LEVELS and I trapped a spider in one room and a zombie pigman in another room ...

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That's how you get them into conversations: talk about things they're interested in. If somebody came up to you and started talking about the stock market, or about the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, or the best Crêpe Suzette recipe they've ever heard of, and you weren't interested in that, you'd probably tune them out, too. (That can be a useful skill, so it's not a total waste...) Figure out what they like to talk about, then talk to them about it. At five they're happy to talk about the things they're interested in, and they're at the age where they have developed concrete interests (those interests might still change frequently, but they're starting to be a bit more well defined than they were at 2-3).