There are three types of parent who might want to encourage their children to play chess. Which type of parent are you?
Meet Mr & Mrs Tiger.
They expect their children to be high achievers, to gain scholarships to leading schools and then attend top universities. They also want them to excel at their extracurricular activities, and will sometimes choose chess. In a few cases they might want them to become grandmasters, if they have the ability, but they perceive the game as something that will help them earn more money when they grow up. They are prepared to make financial investments to this end, and will sign their children up to professionally run junior chess clubs. They see the more formal lessons they offer as bringing academic benefits, see serious chess study as a precursor to serious academic study and want their children to take part in competitive chess. Spending a day in silence solving hard puzzles with the clock ticking is seen as a valuable rehearsal for future public examinations.
Their cultural background will be very much family oriented: they believe that everything their children do in life will reflect on their family, which is why they expect their children to work hard, and to take both academic work and extracurricular activities seriously.
Now meet Mr & Mrs Monkey.
If you mention Tiger Parents to Mr & Mrs Monkey they will throw up their hands in horror, pitying their children and fearing that the pressure they’re put under will lead to a burnout. Their view of childhood is very different: childhood should be a time of fun, with children introduced to a wide variety of fun and stress-free activities and encouraged to develop independence. While Mr & Mrs Tiger might be authoritative, or even authoritarian parents, Mr & Mrs Monkey are liberal, progressive parents. They might choose to send their children to primary school chess clubs, seeing the game as a fun, low-level activity suitable for young children. But, if you ask them to help or encourage their children at home they will often reply “We don’t want them to be GOOD: it wouldn’t be FUN”. If you suggest that, as their children are doing well at school they might want to join an outside club, they’ll turn down the offer, telling you they want their children to have a balanced life.
Although they have radically different philosophies concerning how to bring up their children, the Tigers and the Monkeys both believe their children should have their evenings, weekends and holidays filled with enriching activities. The Tiger children will do a few things well, but under pressure, while the Monkey children will do lots of things moderately, superficially under less pressure.
Finally meet Mr & Mrs Tortoise
Mr & Mrs Tortoise have a very different idea of childhood to both the Tiger and the Monkey parents. Their parents, who were brought up in the 1950s and 1960s have told them how different their childhood was. They also keep in touch with the latest issues concerning childhood, education and parenting, having read Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, and admiring the views of Lenore Skenazy. Just like the Tigers and Monkeys, they want the best for their children, but they go about bringing up their children very differently, taking an evidence-based approach.
They are sceptical of the value of giving children a highly scheduled, very busy life, and have also noted that, according to Haidt and others, it’s the children of liberal parents like the Monkeys who have the worst mental health. They believe that young children need, along with authoritative parenting, more time outside and more time in unstructured play. Chess, as a highly structured indoor activity doesn’t tick the boxes. They will also introduce their children to a wide range of age-appropriate indoor games at home, each of which will produce slightly different benefits. They will probably only introduce their children to chess at home when they have mastered simpler strategy games. If their children show an interest in chess at, say, 12 or 13, they might encourage them to join a chess club. But there’s a problem: they won’t enjoy children’s clubs which are full of 7 and 8 year olds, while they may not be ready for adult chess clubs, which, in any case, continue late into the evening.
One of the ideas of Chess Minds is to provide a club for the Tortoise children, whose parents believe that ‘slow and steady wins the race’.
Having said that, Tiger chess parenting can work well for children who have a genuine interest and talent in the game.
The Monkey parents, although they probably have the same values as me, and vote for the same politicians as me, give their children, perhaps not just in chess, the worst of both worlds. They are often taught too young because it’s ‘fun’, and too quickly because learning slowly would be ‘boring’, so, although their primary school chess club will provide short-term enjoyment, they will soon become frustrated and disillusioned with the game.
CHESS MINDS 