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I was thinking about this with respect to social skills recently. I don't have good social skills and neither do my parents. I'm sure it's partly genetic, but my grandmother had incredible social skills. She remembered everybody and she remembered details about them. She was an excellent conversationalist who never ran out of things to talk about. Even into her late nineties she maintained an active social life, going out and making new friends. She never passed on an opportunity to meet a new person and she'd remember them. Her brother was also similarly talented, in particular being really good at telling hilarious stories, which he had an endless supply of.
I used to think this was entirely innate, but I learned that the house she grew up in had a constant stream of visitors. My mother told me that every time she visited her grandparents, there were always visitors and they'd come for half and hour and then leave. Then someone else would come, all day every day for years as far as she knew. My grandmother and her brother would have spent their childhoods entertaining and talking to adults. I also know that , as children, they did a lot of visiting themselves. For Christmas, they would go to each house, stop for a while and talk to the family there, and then move on to the next one.
This is completely different than how I grew up, where adults would only visit occasionally and as children, we wouldn't talk to them much. I think the way my grandmother was raised played a big role in the development of her social skills.
Social media maybe to blame, or TV. Technology gives more ways for people to socialize at a distance or to disengage.
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