I am a big advocate for chess and education. I strongly believe that chess can help people of all ages, especially at a younger age, in so many ways. However, I am not and I would never advocate being single dimensional. As evident in this blog, I cover quite a number of topics and issues. It is more important to me to sacrifice a hundred or two Elo points but be a much more rounded and happy individual than to be obsessed with just one thing. I value the importance of education, intellect, physical fitness, and much more. This is how I raise my children and this is what I promote daily. Chess to me is a great tool to give children a wonderful jump start in their lives. Here is a very interesting article about the two sides of genius. What is your opinion?
Child prodigy: Two sides of genius
Stories by S.S. YOGA
Child prodigies may have a headstart compared to their more average peers – but how will they turn out later in life?
…Is it right then to call a child prodigy, gifted?…
…Australian pianist David Helfgott, had to deal with an abusive and overbearing father; Helfgott suffered a major mental breakdown. But he rose above his circumstances and carved a career of popular acclaim. If it sounds familiar, it may be because it inspired the Oscar-nominated movie, Shine.
But that could also be the conventional view of how child prodigies eventually turn out – lives broken and unfulfilled. And there is also the widespread belief that young geniuses are pushed and prodded to extremes by one or both parents.
Just what is a child prodigy, though? According to American developmental psychologist Dr David Henry Feldman, typically it is a child younger than 10 who is performing at the level of a highly trained adult in a very demanding field of endeavour.
Very few scientific studies have been done on prodigies; Dr Feldman and his colleagues did one in 1991.
He notes that there are some fields in which child prodigies are more frequently found. Music is the most common, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been hailed as the most gifted. Chess has contributed some names, too. The late American chess master Bobby Fischer (who unfortunately fell into the “troubled” category of prodigies) is seen as the most astounding proponent of the discipline. Another science noted for producing prodigies is mathematics.
But such cases are rare in creative fields like writing, dance and philosophy, or even business and law. Dr Feldman has proposed that children are more likely to compete in fields that are highly structured with clear established rules, like music and mathematics. So for those who have more open-ended goals, disciplines such as writing, which require experience and abstract thinking, would be more difficult to master.
Here is the full story.
I think you’re right. The chess fanatics usually become nuts.
Sometimes an undiagnosed condition is exposed as a result of chess. Some people with brain disorders that are birth rlated are very talented at math, science, and chess. Not every becomes insane, but rather go undiagnosed because mother and father do not want to accept that there is something wrong with their chess/math/science prodigy. With the appropriate help, gifted children with brain disorders can be “normal” members of society. Unchecked and untreated they become Fischerish.
The child’s mental health is as important as physical health, but many parents do not catch it if they have the same disorder as their children. What do we know about the mental health of Fischer’s mother and father?
I think the most important part of the article was the one talking about self-esteem:
“the over-cultivated can develop self-esteem problems and performance anxiety.”
I’m not a psychologist, but someone very interested in psychology (real psychology, not self-help crap). Through my personal experiences, as a student who got scholarships to go study abroad for academic achievements, I can say first hand that the pressure one imposes on oneself can be really crushing. I arrived at this really high-level school and I just couldn’t get the grades and results that I felt I should have, and in a particularly bad period, I spent a few months in really bad shape, even thinking about hurting myself once.
I eventually came to realise that the problem was not that I had become a bad student (which I didn’t have, by the way), but only that I couldn’t reconcile the one I wanted to be with the image I saw when I looked in the mirror. The subtle thing is that even the image I saw wasn’t accurate, but completely influenced by my self-esteem problems at the time. I eventually learned to put less pressure on myself, and I live better now, but it took me some time and a lot of self-analysis and conversations with friends and family to understand how to deal with it.
Something similar also happened with my ex-girlfriend, who had a nervous breakdown and spent two weeks in the hospital out of self-imposed pressure to succeed in absolutely everything she was doing.
I think the point is that when you’ve learned, since a young age, to see yourself as someone “perfect” or a genius or something like that, you really have a hard time reconciling yourself with the fact that EVERYONE will fail at something and have problems in a moment or another of their lives. If your self-esteem tells you that this should never happen to you, it’ll be a huge shock when it finally comes. Or you’ll kill yourself just to avoid it!
So I think the most important point in this whole discussion is that you have to know that you may fail (especially if you’re playing Karpov for a World Championship Match!) and accept it for the sake of your mental health!
To me a prodigy is a child who starts out with obvious skill from almost the very beginning, before his practice and study can account for the skill.
Fischer was not a child prodigy. Fischer slowly grew in strength, mostly from un-ending hard work. Fischer was no chess savant, he dedicated himself to chess study; and he was better at absorbing all that study than most people would have been.
In contrast, Morphy seems to have quietly watched people play, and then was immediately at a decent level of strength from the very beginning at a young age.
Morphy could not have worked as hard at chess as did Fischer. Fischer always had a russian monograph or whatever chess publication he could get his hands on. Morphy had very little such material available.
Fischer had daily opportunities to learn by playing stronger players in Manhatten, whereas Morphy had nothing comparable available to him.
Ahahaha:-)
“A single dimensional”?Are you kidding.You know Susan,chess is a game played on a square board.
You should be ,at least, two dimensional for that reason!
But I don’t understand a “sac 100 elo points” part in your text too.