If the other person does mention his family, then it is perfectly OK to ask about the ages of the children, and if you have children, to compare educational and cultural differences in raising children.
When we say that a language is culturally transmitted - that is, that it is learned rather than inherited - we mean that it is part of that whole complex of learned and shared behavior that anthropologists call culture.
In the case of language, however, it is only the ability to talk and understand that we inherit genetically; the particular language or languages that we speak are passed on to us not by genetic transmission but by cultural transmission.
Japanese Dictionary
