Why is this article Bay Area specific? As a matter of fact it really isn't, however, it is especially pertinent to a certain parent prototype that I encounter in the Bay Area more often than elsewhere. Who is this mercurial parent creature? He/She is a motivated person who dreams of her child realizing their potential. She is loving to her children and energetic. She is performance oriented and diligent. She is a pedantic planner and is very reliable. She is pleasant, personable, and attentive. She invested much in herself to build her career and she like to control her fate and her future. My colossal chess parents are involved with their kids' chess in different ways, and as is natural to any new undertaking it is a learning process that is unique to each.

The most important piece of understanding that I could offer to a parent is that chess development is all about human emotions. It is, of course, also about generics and stamina and psychological makeup, but it is more about emotions than it is about these other things because an average kids potential in chess is MUCH greater than most kids ever achieve and even in view of superior genes many young gladiators of the mind never amount to anything. It is true for students of all ages but is especially true for children. This understanding is central to my teaching methods and informs all my coaching decisions.

I won't go into the benefits of chess as this is a topic for another long article or even a book and will limit myself to saying that it is a wonderful skill to have. It develops patience, combinatorial reasoning, planning, imagination, perseverance, etc. Chess, being the art form that it is, can be an enormous source of positive emotions. It really is identical to sculpture or painting or even creative writing in this sense; however there's also a competitive angle to the game which gives it both a sportive an academic flavor. A child's brain (and consequently mind) is pliable in ways an adult could only dream of and when powered by positive emotions toward an activity the brain physically specializes toward it; that is synapses form to support the skills involved. In fact, ideally this gives rise to a positive reinforcement cycle where an acquired skill (through, say, winning a game or better yet winning a tournament) triggers positive emotions which in turn stimulate skill acquisition. There is also a social angle to all this which I will leave unexplored in this article.

Equipped with this emotions-first realization how are we to monitor a child's performance? Simply put at the early stages performance is irrelevant and having fun is. A parent would do well to give up any expectations of a child suddenly starting to beat his peers after, say 7 lessons. It is important at early stages to discover which aspect of the training process are most stimulating for your child (my student) and to zoom on this source of joy. In fact, initially it is a learning process for everybody: for me on how to tap into the student, for the child who doesn't know what to expect, and for the parent on how to support this undertaking. Performance will come naturally and gradually, but for us, the serenaded overachievers who invest heavily into their children, it can be hard wait.

I often find myself reminding the parents that kids do not learn like adults. With their fantastic neuroplasticity the little monsters require a lot less structure than the grownups and much more repetition. This understanding informs my methods and can feel uncomfortable and even chaotic to the more structured grown ups. I typically start my relationships with students in this semi-random mode and only later and gradually add structure (and homework) to our interactions. However, it isn't uncommon for a parent who takes the lectures together with the kid to forget that I orient the lesson toward the child and not toward the adult. With adults my methods and the format tend to differ.

At the very beginning I typically feed the students a diet of elementary endgames, classic middlegames, and opening positions and tricks. So, how can a parent get involved? One way to be involved for a parent is to attend the lessons together with the child and try to learn chess with them. In this mode kids can quickly outrun the adults, however, even in this case adults can continue to add value in different areas. Upon experiencing the event horizon when a child starts to regularly, say, outcalculate the parent the instinct can be to retreat from the process. Instead, the adult could adjust their role and focus on the aspects of the game they can nevertheless help the child with. I welcome parent participation because it can accelerate learning and ultimately strengthen a parent-child bond. For preteens regular parent participation can be extremely productive. For this age group a parent can help tremendously with pacing and time management. I typically meet with students weekly and parents can help avoid obsessive multi-hour "moonwalks" or on the opposite end of the spectrum irregular exercise and procrastination. I also work with families who trust me deeply with teaching their kids and choose to participate peripherally. This too can work very well especially when a kid already has a decent foundation. Often such parents do a great job of providing equipment for remote learning, they will acquire the necessary software and will spend time teaching youngsters to use the computer and the chess software. They will spend time looking for training partners (especially pertinent in these strange COVID times) and will sacrifice an odd weekend to take the kid to a chess tournament (hopefully in the better times).

Another category of concerns that motivated parents sometimes have early on goes like this: "The world is full of chess resources such as books, videos, software, articles, blogs, and sites. Does it make sense for the coach to teach a topic that might be freely accessible, say online?". Yes, of course it is. My best suggestion is to have a little faith in the process and to extend a little trust. Every day chess knowledge is expanded and published. Every year technology makes it more accessible. Certain children being of the right age can start either learning on their own or together with a parent. A given topic might be accessible elsewhere but I use an approach to communicate it. A topic rarely just hangs in a vacuum during my lessons, rather there is a flow associated with it; a flow that might start being visible over a course of multiple lessons. For a topic to become a tool in a student's mind it has to be repeatedly served and possibly with an array of sauces. There often is nuance that is communicated by me during a lecture and isn't necessary communicated elsewhere. There is an emotion connection when a coach interacts with a kid that is absent otherwise. A kid can ask a coach questions and can bounce ideas back and forth. It is an emotionally fulfilling experience. Also, for many topics I give a unique approach or a unique algorithm unavailable elsewhere. Then more often than not, humans communicate with one another at a much higher bandwidth and learn faster from one another than in other regimes. Finally, a coach is one who inspires by, say, showing a game and pointing out the hidden beauty, by humanizing an otherwise a mechanical process.

In fact, the same can be said about learning in all other domains. Today there is an infinitude of knowledge freely available in just about any subject and the value that a competent teacher embodies is more than the sum of his domain expertise.

Let me try to summarize the spaghetti of thoughts and ideas outlined above. The very propensities which make us, the denizens of the Valley of the Silicon, awesome can get in our way when we parent. Extracurricular education is a wonderful undertaking and can transform kids' lives and create the otherwise unavailable lifelong trampolines for them. We, the denizens, like no one else understand this and invest in our posterity. However, when we get involved with these projects it is important not to forget to trust to relax and to keep an open mind; results will follow!