Chess Parenting

Chapter 1: Responsibility and Self-discipline

Chapter 2: Truth and Illusion

Chapter 3: Commitment and Observation

Chapter 4: Courage and Caution

Chapter 5: Having and Losing

Chapter 6: Doing and Being

Chapter 7: Beginnings and Endings

Chapter 8: Strategic Parenting

Chapter 9: Control and Trust

Chapter 10: Competence and Confidence

Chapter 11: Tactical moves

Chapter 12. Rules and their Breaking

Chapter 13: Sex and Chess

Chapter 14: Fitness and Body

Chapter 15: Teenagers and playing for draw

Chapter 16: Patience and Non-waiting

Chapter 17: Chess as Meditation

Chapter 18: Chess for Telepathy

Chapter 19: Love and Beauty

Chapter 20: Duality and Oneness

Other books by Fritz Blackburn

Chapter 1: Responsibility and Self-discipline

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I hate school screams my fifteen-year old female descendant. They always tell you what to do and it’s all gay old bull anyway. I can’t honestly disagree, having hosted similar feelings towards an institution that forced uninteresting information on me that I could not question and that treated me with absolute authority rather than with respect.

I like learning things only after verifying them for myself. My kids are like that too.

Surely, it is better for kids to have opportunity and time to develop character, emotional experience and mind mastery, than it is to have second hand knowledge shovelled down their throats? The school curriculum is much more concerned with producing workers for existing machines, with yesterday’s economic and political utilities and with social engineering, than it is with reaching for the human potential.

In our day, family and village no longer foster social ability or offer anything like rites of passage or any actual initiation into adulthood! Schools are supposed to take on such functions but don’t.

Sit down then. Let’s play a game of chess! Yeaah! I’ll whip your ass, dad, wails a pleased monster teenager...

We’ve been doing this ever since the girls could hold a pawn without eating it, and I do like the results. They’re not as nuts now from their overdosing on oestrogen as they otherwise would be...

To experience that you can win against an adult, this species who always knows best and is always right, when you’re seven—that changes everything! Authority no longer comes automatically with age but wants to be earned, which means a kid can have the authority! Why should a smart kid listen to grown-ups who obviously can’t think very clearly...? But an adult who masters his own mind—he really deserves the respect others may demand only because of their age!

Here is the chance for a kid to overcome her parent—so she does not need to engage in more serious hostilities later...here a boy can safely murder his father and so resolve his Oedipus-grudge without hurting him! Here a girl can show her equal (or superior...) female logic!

The resulting equal footing and respect in the parent/teenager relationship is worth a million dollars! It is the basis for true, joyful learning and self-development, without any need for demands, control, punishments or force!

The girls whipped nearly every adult player in the Bay of Islands by age twelve and were possessed by a deep sense of self-respect and self-reliance. It translated into all the other walks of life they tried. They won all their karate tournaments, decorating our home with trophies and medals, and they made blackbelt at ages twelve and fifteen, the little one winning gold at the New Zealand Nationals at age eleven. She also played key-board, her sister the guitar and flute, and both made plenty of other successful and happy noises throughout their childhood.

But to have them go quiet as church mice, chess would be the solo-dad’s best weapon! No fighting, no boredom, no hanging.

And, quite playfully, it pushes for excellence...

Most people understand that chess helps mathematical skills and logic. But it is so much more than that! Here we have a tool to bring out those quintessential human skills or values, that are so neglected and ignored today, like self-discipline, self-respect, responsibility, good judgement, creative visualization and truth-seeking!

Kids love to play, as do all sane adults. Learning works much better inside a game of skill. Today, children don’t play enough, and never unsupervised, and never responsible unto themselves, which stifles brain development considerably. Playtime is not respected as such by parents and increasingly sacrificed for structured agendas. With chess, you have both!

However—what they learn here is not graciously handed down arbitrary, second-hand knowledge, but instead the ability to use their own minds, to reason and see what is and to act on their own fresh ideas. School fosters storing archival knowledge, but chess fosters intelligence and the discernment between truth and illusion!

On the surface, chess appears to be more mental than physical or emotional. To play chess well, however, one needs to be physically fit (oxygenated), and learn to let go of tensions from useless emotions like wanting to win, fearing to lose, anger at mistakes, doubt, or feeling pressured! To free the mind of distractions and negative attitudes plays a major part in emotional intelligence and in cleansing the mind from clutter and background noise. Only where the mind is clear can we have deeper insights and authentic feelings.

Emotions are mental by-products of a struggling mind. Jealousy and anger are obvious examples. Only when the mind is at ease, unburdened by troublesome emotions and imaginations, can we become truly capable to engage in friendship, real love, in un-avoided sadness, accepting grief and fearless happiness, and all other real feelings...

Chess is even more effective at this shedding of false emotions than hugging!

Chess presents as formidable a Zen-discipline as do archery, tea-ceremony or the arranging of flowers. The Japanese are quite innocent of chess however; the kingly game came from the Persian/Chinese cultural circles, where it manifests the principles of yin and yang and of Taoist harmony.

Chess is a duality game, where black and white respond to each other in describing a universe of polar opposites that is uncannily symbolic of all reality. There is no limit to the depth of this interaction. You can never hope to learn all there is to know, or always win. You never stop learning the game for as long as you live! It remains forever fascinating, unmastered and new—a tool never to lose its mind-sculpting edge.

The best thing is—kids can win against adults, who lose their hiding place behind the number of their age or income...

Kids can prove their worth without ridicule here, which for boys is the second greatest need. There is then no fear of authoritative rulings or patronising paternal bull. Children can find actual truth underneath mere opinions, and real respect, which is what girls and boys need the most.

Can you imagine what it does for abstract thinking? We once played with river stones in a dried-out river bed, having no chess set...after a few hours we had become so used to the stones on the sandy landscape that we quite forgot about the lack of a proper set, and quite enjoyed a few pretty little games... You look at a rock and see a rook and a taller rock is the queen and eventually players learn to visualize enough to play blind, which is entirely without board or pieces. This abstract visualization ability is what then marks the great scientist, researcher, CEO or artist...

And it teaches great discipline quite naturally and from within, instead of a discipline imposed against resistance, by a pestering and forever unsuccessful parent!

In matters of spiritual growth, which has nothing to do with religious concepts, our modern societies are poor and helpless. Who is teaching our kids to seek truth or to take responsibility for their own minds? Nobody even believes in truth as a value any more, sacrificing it with every step to opinion, to political correctness, and to convenience.

In chess, there is usually only one best or true move, beyond the hundred opinions!

To dig up that deeper truth, beyond views and appearances—that is the Tao of chess and the fast track to evolving mind and consciousness!

This pursuit of the true next move inevitably leads us on a journey, where we also meet those other values, like justice, courage, beauty. From there, it all just happens...

Not all kids like chess, of course. Lack of curiosity or of confidence is usually the reason. Those kids may profit from it even more...

There cannot really be an absence of interest in chess, where there is an interest in mind and in reaching for boundary...

There is however something about chess that many people thoroughly dislike: it forces us into being responsible! No dice, no chance, no blaming on anything else—we are solely responsible for the outcome, for the future of the game, for what we do now! We live with the consequences of our actions! And this is what makes chess such a formidable educational and spiritual tool!

Few things today are less recognised than the dreadful absence of consequences in modern children’s lives! Proportionally to our own latent fears, we protect our kids from life, from painful experience and from the consequences of their actions or inactions until they are adults or at an age where they are supposed to be.

It starts with don’t touch that candle! in an ominous and warning mother’s voice, when a toddler slowly approaches the flame with her hand and it continues as a general and abrupt don’t touch! for years. It continues every time we rescue our sweetie from real life, until they withdraw their hands and fail trying to compre-hand altogether...

We save them from bullies, from fever, from boredom, pain and work—and think it love when we clean up after them...

Here is the real reason for our rising crime rates and non-functional democracies—you can’t get responsible adults by pampering kids into non-responsibility!!

It is only on top of this, that we save them from our own boredom by showing them violent films that put picture and proposal to those non-responsible, but wide-open minds, while we could at any time choose to become responsible ourselves and offer them some constructive educational alternatives...

Mind you—the ecological destruction of our planet is also mainly caused by non-responsible adults and only secondarily by chemicals. Not by children!

We don’t really feel responsible for our own kids’ education, which we leave to underfunded schools where bullies rule from top to bottom!

We feel not even responsible for our own health and leave the responsibility to doctors who make money from selling pills, plastic body-parts and antibiotics...

We are never responsible when our relationships fail, as we can blame our partners thereafter called the bitch and the asshole.

We have built our societies in a way where the individual does not feel responsible. He may be held responsible, but he does not feel the courage of being responsible, nor the freedom or the beauty of it.

Unlike a king, who is responsible all his life, the prime minister and president today can order hundreds of thousands killed in illegal wars, without any reason, and then retire on a fat pension! He does not feel responsible for the deaths of innocents. Nor do any of us.

No peasants with pitchforks waiting outside the castle in democracies...

How can we expect our children to feel self-responsible?

When we travel to Kampuchea, seeing a seven-year old boy proudly running his own business, networking with travellers or selling coconuts for six hours a day—we call that child labour and pity the little entrepreneur who can calculate, wears Adidas, and speaks English...

Schools talk lots of responsibilities and of consequences, and teach it as equating punishment. So, children dislike those two words, probably for good.

A fight in the school yard teaches much better about consequences ...and that is why it happens! The bully threatening to beat you into a pulp is actually teaching you more about taking care of yourself and about being responsible for yourself than the rescuing teacher or parent! This may be hard for a solo-dad of two girls to embrace—but it is the observable truth.

Let us be a little more controversial: If you never let a kid use a knife, because she could cut herself—you’re causing your kid to become incompetent, insecure, anxious, dangerous and distrusted, with no faith in Self and with lowered intelligence! She cannot develop self-discipline, appropriate caution or confidence if she is not allowed to cut herself! Blood and pain are great teachers and deemed necessary by the natural world...This natural feedback for careless, casual or arrogant approaches cannot always be replaced with words!

In chess, children enter a world where they always face the consequences for what they do and see incorrectly, and where the future of any game is the fair outcome of their actions, insights, or lack thereof! Everything is fair, nothing left to happenstance.

They are totally and solely responsible here!

From this sense of being in charge grows true self-discipline, while imposed discipline can never possibly lead to that fine result. It creates only resistance and refusal and rejection of all teaching.

The lack of motivation in modern school kids comes from not being under their own steam! They want to be in charge and get hurt some!

Boot-camp in the jungle is great, but today unwieldy for most. Chess can be the answer for many here!

Chess players don’t blame each other when they lose! They own