The Power Of Parent Involvement

 

Who is just as important as the players in your club? The parents! They are the ones shuffling players to and from events, spending their weekends supporting their children, and paying the tournament entry fees. Getting parents to "buy in" to your chess program is an integral part of your club’s success.

So, how do you get parents to champion your cause? Here are three ways I do it:

• Send a Weekly Newsletter — After our weekly practice, I send a chess team newsletter via email. The newsletter covers different things each week, but it always entails a calendar of events (tournaments), ChessKid homework shout-outs from the previous week, homework announcements for the upcoming week, and a blurb about the lesson I taught.

How it helps: Parents enjoy the newsletters because they give some insight into what we are working on, they set expectations around homework, and hopefully they foster some chess-related discussion among family members in the evenings.

To enhance the newsletter experience, consider including pictures of your players.

• Involve Parent Volunteers — This can take many forms, but whenever we have a team room, I ask for two parents to volunteer to assist for the duration of the tournament. They help with various things such as bathroom runs, escorting players to and from the playing hall, and lunch duty. If you are lucky, you may even have a parent with some tournament experience that can help analyze.

How it helps: As parents take turns spending the day with the team, they are not only bonding with their children and seeing how much they enjoy chess, but they are also seeing first-hand that chess is not a simple board game. It requires a commitment to competing, practicing, and finishing homework.

• Provide Chess Sets at Home — Herbert Hoover's presidential campaign promised that if he was elected there would be “a chicken in every pot.” Similarly, I made it a mission to have a chess set in every one of my player's homes. Luckily, I had a few spare sets for players that didn’t already have one. Before long, my players were teaching their parents and siblings how to play, and some parents became their child's routine sparring partner.

How it helps: Having chess sets at home made chess a shared interest in the family and raised the overall level of enthusiasm.

Many parents are not as chess-literate as the coaches, or even the children, so finding various ways to keep them informed, engaged, and enthusiastic is vital to a healthy chess program. The more you communicate with parents, the more willing they are to encourage and support their players.

A second-grader working on tactics has engaged his kindergarten sister. She will be joining the team next year!