The Kids' Gambit: How Chess Helps Young Minds Grow
by Grace Bueler, March 1st, 2024
While most 3-year-olds are trying to decide on their favourite crayon colour, Hoor Fatima was playing in the 2023 Kashmir Open International FIDE Rated Chess Tournament, earning a champion title.
Hoor is only one of countless young people around the world who are playing the game of kings, competing for world titles or simply in an after school program. Paul Rickmanis, a director at a New South Wales primary school told ABC News Australia in 2021 that >they can’t keep chess boards in stock. Not only that, but the U.S. Chess Federation National High School Championship in April 2023 had to add overflow rooms for their record 1,750 attendees, and chess lessons are now mandatory in Armenian schools.
Kids chess is also gaining significant traction throughout the scientific community, earning a reputation as a tool for growth in children, both socially and intellectually; it helps with problem solving, attention spans, behaviour moderation, and more. Andthe younger the children start, the better, chess.com proclaimed in 2019, referring to one of many studies on chess’s benefits for growing minds. As Hoor proved in Kashmir, even classes for kindergarten students shouldn’t be out of the question.
"The most important quality of chess is that it's a fair game, so young children start learning a game which is clean and honourable, and it teaches them good behaviour,” Serzh Sargsyan, Armenia’s former president told BBC regarding his motivation for making chess lessons mandatory in schools “I think this is a great benefit for society as a whole.”
Simple Rules, Countless Lessons
It’s no secret that chess is beneficial to the growing minds of children. As an assistant to chess school clubs, I am no longer surprised by how quickly my students pick up the basic rules of play and strategy. They often quickly progress to speeding through games, correcting each other, and proudly shouting out names of pieces I hold up. It’s easy to spot the specific skills they’re building here, but the most impressive growth is present in skills that extend far beyond a checkerboard: stronger cognitive competence, easier problem solving, more focused attention.
In 2012, researchers from the University of La Laguna analyzed the cognitive capabilities of 170 Spanish school children, half of whom played chess and half of whom played basketball or soccer. Comparing the results of the students before and after their extracurriculars were done, the researchers found that thechess players showed stronger cognitive competence in multiple measures of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, including arithmetic, picture completion, and object assembly. They also excelled in the more general skill of problem solving, more easily identifying problems, analyzing alternatives, and properly executing their choices. After these chess lessons, the students’ teachers firmly asserted that their students seemed more focused on tasks, more receptive to corrections, rules, and work routines, and displayed increased perseverance when encountering difficulties.
In 2013, researchers arranged to have a chess grandmaster deliver 10 chess lessons to 20 Romanian primary school students. They found that the children’s ability to maintain focused attention and resistance to monotony notably increased at the end of the chess lessons. They attributed this to how playing chess encourages children to spend extended periods of time in front of its simple board, consistently applying its never-changing rules in order to win rounds.
When assisting in Extra Ed chess clubs in schools, I never tell my students what move to make, despite many of them often getting stuck trying to pick the “perfect” move. This is an understandable goal, yet there’s mental acuity being flexed that has nothing to do with winning and everything to do with seeing their own strategies through. Students struggle to pick which piece to move first while others simply copy each move their opponent makes, incessantly giggling. Chess teaches you not only to allow yourself to set your own intentions, but the skills necessary to see them through, whether that be for an afterschool game or life beyond protective pawns and sweeping bishops.
Scream, Laugh, and Shake Hands
Observing chess classes for kids is nothing short of chaotic. One memorable seven year old spontaneously decided to join a neighbouring game, forming a feckless triad while one kindergartner cried at my mere asking him to join a game. One pair laughed uncontrollably as they spent an entire game copying each other’s moves, while two boys got into a near shouting match over whether one of them had moved his rook to D5 or D6.
These moments are bursting with emotion with some signaling a potential for a teachable moment. The game of chess is often regarded as an intellectual game, its social benefits easy to overlook despite multiple studies touting its encouragement of social development. One study conducted by Lebanese University’s Faculty of Education tested children diagnosed with ADHD to see whether the demands of a successful chess player (concentration, patience, consideration) would help regulate emotions and limit undesirable behaviour. They discovered that the students who played chess regulated their emotions more effectively than those who were not learning chess, attributing this to another study’s finding that chess involves constant changes on the board and therefore more attention to the task at hand rather than a player’s own reactivity.
Another study analyzed how chess affected young players’ aversion to risk. Led by Professor Asad Islam of Australia’s Monash University, a team of researchers analyzed the effects of a World Chess Federation-approved chess curriculum on roughly 400 fifth grade students. They concluded that through the repeated exposure of chess’s win/lose scenarios and frequent requirement of moves that sacrifice less valuable pieces to capture more valuable ones not only acquainted young people with calculated risk-taking, but how to tell this apart from reckless behaviour. In an article published by Monash University about the study, Professor Islam expresses that children need to learn how to take risksfor not only their school life, but life in general: “If children are too risk averse it might prevent them from swimming at the beach, going to a public park or participating in contact sports for risk of injury.”
At the beginning of each game, I encourage my students to look each other in the eye, introduce themselves (if they don’t know each other), and shake each other’s hand before they begin their game. Realizing that your opponent is a person just like you not only welcomes empathy and understanding but a willingness to help. This was all it took for my kindergartner to be welcomed into a game with an older student who readily agreed to help him. For the case of the wandering rook, it didn’t take much encouragement for the students to calmly explain what they thought happened and agree on the fairest course of action before they were ready to proceed.
The Queen’s Gambit and Beyond
There was a time when people would look down on chess as something only “nerdy” people could enjoy. However, chess has never been more socially accepted than it is today. In fact, “chess is booming” The New York Times recently claimed, citing Netflix’s wildly popular mini-series The Queen’s Gambit (and its 62 million household watchers during its first month of streaming). The CEO of Chess.com Erik Allebest claims this was partly due to the need for indoor activities during Covid, seeing a doubling of monthly active users from 8 million to 17 million between late 2020 and early 2022. St. Louis’s Webster University has just started the first minor program for chessand even the New York Times dedicates an entire online section to news about the sport.
Chess is clearly seeing wider acceptance, which is good news for parents worried that such a contemplative game places their child into the “nerd” bucket. Kids are free to join a growing global community of risk-takers, negotiators, and strategists, emboldened by the sport’s fading narrow reputation to make their own decisions about how they consider the game.
From what I’ve seen, freedom is baked into the nature of the sport itself. Whether a child cleverly plans for victory by setting strategic traps or a normally shy child spends an entire game making her knight loudly neigh, freedom abounds across chess’s checkered landscape, much to the giggling welcome of young players. When expressed in the safe environment of a classroom, surrounded by friends, it’s this freedom for young people to be themselves that brings about emotional growth and maturity.
As Hoor’s father Bilal recently told the online magazine, Kashmir Scan, “It’s important to let children explore their passions and discover their talents. We should encourage them to pursue what they love, and that’s when they truly excel.”
