We’d inquired about a chess club in my seven-year-old son’s school last year, and were delighted when one started in January. We immediately enrolled him and soon he was playing other chess-mad kids every Thursday, and coming home to regale us with his many victories.
His passion for chess has been a recurring feature in our lives for the past two years. He famously taught me how to play the game when he was five, and beat me in all our early matches. My brother Dara, a keen player, once told me his proudest moment was the day his son beat him at chess for the first time. It’s a source of shameful joy that my proudest moment might have been the first time I beat mine.
Soon, however, he was beating me much more regularly, then beating me almost all the time. In 2026, my wins have grown so scarce that I haven’t beaten him in nearly two months.
He reads about the game obsessively, and watches explainers and tutorials on YouTube, their all-caps titles obscuring the technical precision of their contents. “A Chess Master LOST to this Fool’s Mate In 4 MOVES”, being one recent example, alongside “When a kid *DESTROYS* A Chess Trash Talker!” This is a marked uptick in the quality of his screen time, which is no longer formed entirely of videos about Minecraft blared by excruciatingly voluble American teens.
Chess has also formed an area of concentration that has reduced other negative behaviours, such as screaming about his bedtime, or constantly, constantly asking us if he can have chicken nuggets.
He studies the board by himself, manoeuvring pieces into as many configurations as he can, crafting perfect checkmate positions, and strategising ingenious new pins and forks that will catch his opponent out. Since that opponent is me, and every single game of chess I have ever played has been against him, I do not stand a chance.
I like chess just fine but it is not a pastime for which I have either the time or the inclination to match his zeal. (I did, I’m forced to admit, spend a little time watching chess videos in secret, simply for the purpose of beating him more often, but to little effect.) In the end, I’ve had to admit that he is no longer getting any better by beating me every day, in much the same way my poker skills would not improve if I were constantly playing a pigeon.
Chess club, then, was a boon. He was, he told us, playing kids many years older than himself, and thrilled at the challenge week after week. In short, things were good. And then came half-term and, with it, a manic period of balancing work and parenting, a blitz of emails I didn’t catch, and a missed deadline to enrol him in chess club for this term. When the school contacted me to say the class was now full, I was filled with dread and shame.
My son took it well, until the first Thursday he watched his classmates file away to his beloved club while he had to stay behind. At pickup I met him, crying, at the gates, and felt like a war criminal.
The hardships of parenting are commonly described in terms of the things our children do to us; the early years of crying and refusing to sleep, their distribution of delightful bodily functions, the refusal to eat even one bite of a dinner that does not feature chicken nuggets. None of these things, difficult as they are, come close to the pain you feel when you let your children down.
And the true horror of parenting is you will never escape this. If you’re not careful, it can become the defining sensation of parenting. None of the responsible, loving, joyous acts you carry out as a dad soothe you very much on those occasions you mess up. You don’t, as the old saying goes, get points for the times you drive sober.
I emailed and called the school, and even popped in to see if something, anything, could be done. It could not, and anxious not to seem like the kind of pushy, entitled parent I loathe, I said thanks and returned to my son with a promise that we’d be the first to sign up for the following term.
He sniffed and smiled and asked if he could have some chicken nuggets. “Yes,” I said, having my guilt played like a fiddle, “oh, you’ll be drowning in them.”
