Chess and the Anxious Generation

Introduction

“Hey Mom [Dad], I want to go to Mars!”

Imagine you hear this in a dreamlike state. Thinking back, you recall smiling at your precocious 10-year-old daughter’s excitement about becoming an astrophysicist when she grows up. But now, she seems to be growing impatient. After all, getting a PhD takes time and resilience. Meanwhile she’s discovered a corporation that is recruiting adolescents and preadolescents for a multi-year journey to Mars. Orientation classes are underway; departure is imminent.

You learn that the corporation’s research has found that youth of her age are better suited than adults for the harsh conditions of Mars and space travel. Children can adapt more readily to the physical and neurological challenges stemming from low gravity, increased radiation exposure, and social isolation. How their minds and bodies would adapt after a return to Earth as adults is unclear.

She and many of her friends have already signed up and been accepted based on her online profile and an analysis of her genome. You don’t remember giving permission for any of this but wonder if it was in some fine print for an online box that you (or she) checked.

The Great Rewiring of Childhood

That’s the opening dilemma posed to readers in Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation – How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. Haidt offers persuasive evidence that the now pervasive phone-based childhood journey of today’s youth is taking them on a journey that ill prepares them for life on earth. The confluence of smartphones, social media, and “safetyism” starting around 2015 have had profound effects. Only recently has the evidence of their damage and the need for urgent action become clear.

I highly recommend this book to parents, educators and policy makers. The overview below is provided by Gemini 3.0 Pro. An assessment of the implications for Chess in Education practitioners follows.

📚 Overview of The Anxious Generation

Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, argues that the collapse of adolescent mental health since the early 2010s is primarily caused by two intertwined societal changes. He terms this the “Great Rewiring of Childhood”:

The Decline of the Play-Based Childhood: A shift toward overprotective parenting (“safetyism”) and structured activities has dramatically reduced children’s opportunities for unsupervised, free play and independent exploration in the real world.
The Rise of the Phone-Based Childhood: The rapid, widespread adoption of smartphones and social media (around 2010-2012) moved adolescence from an in-person, physically grounded experience to a screen-based, virtual one.

Haidt argues that this combination has deprived children of the crucial experiences needed to develop resilience and has exposed them to psychological harms at a sensitive developmental stage.

Key Arguments and Harms

The Tidal Wave: Haidt presents statistical evidence showing a sharp, simultaneous surge in anxiety, depression, self-harm, and suicide rates among adolescents in multiple developed countries starting around the early 2010s, which he links to the timing of smartphone saturation.
The Need for Play: He argues that children are “anti-fragile”—they need exposure to manageable risks, setbacks, and conflicts during unsupervised play to develop the social skills, emotional regulation, and confidence required to handle adversity in adulthood.
Four Foundational Harms of the Phone-Based Childhood:
- Social Deprivation: Replacing in-person interaction with digital-only connection, leading to increased loneliness.
- Sleep Deprivation: Smartphones interfering with the quantity and quality of sleep.
- Attention Fragmentation: Constant notifications and scrolling impairing the ability to focus and sustain deep thought.
- Addiction: Platforms designed to maximize engagement exploiting young people’s developing brains.
Differential Harm: He contends that social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok harm girls more, often via social comparison, perfectionism, and body image issues, while the decline of real-world activities has led to a withdrawal of boys into online gaming and other virtual worlds.

The Four Foundational Reforms (Call to Action)

Haidt’s book concludes with a call for collective action across parents, schools, governments, and tech companies, proposing four norms to reverse the trend:

No Smartphones Before High School: Delaying a child’s first smartphone (with internet/apps) until roughly age 14.
No Social Media Before 16: Raising the age for social media accounts, ideally with government-enforced age verification.
Phone-Free Schools: Requiring students to store their phones in lockers or designated pouches from bell to bell.
More Independence, Free Play, and Responsibility: Actively restoring unsupervised, child-led play and giving children more autonomy and responsibility in the real world.

For Additional Information Visit The Anxious Generation website.

Implications of The Anxious Generation for Chess in Education (CiE)

The conceptual framework offered by The Anxious Generation amplifies the case for Chess in Education. At the same time, it seems to challenge the overly structured practices of some chess teachers. I wanted to better understand how Haidt’s assessment and CiE intersected. What might CiE instructors learn from The Anxious Generation? I put the following prompt to Gemini 3.0 Pro. Its instructive response is worth sharing.

Prompt: (as a follow-up to an earlier prompt requesting an overview of The Anxious Generation.)

Your role is that of an expert in chess in education. Using the Haidt overview as a base, discuss what proponents of chess in education can learn from Haidt’s work. Be fair and even-handed. That is, don’t spin the results to advocate chess in education, unless there is a reasonably strong argument for such an assertion.

Response:

That is an excellent point to explore, as the structure and delivery of Chess in Education (CiE) programs directly influences whether they reinforce Haidt’s critique of over-structured childhood or serve as an antidote to screen-time.

Research on CiE has historically prioritized cognitive skills over social-emotional learning (SEL). A clear distinction between the benefits of structured vs. unstructured play is often missing. Haidt’s work, however, forces proponents to shift this focus.

🔬 CiE Research through Haidt’s Lens

The available research on the educational benefits of chess, when viewed against Haidt’s framework, reveals a tension between the proven benefits of structured instruction (which he critiques) and the aspirational benefits of independent, in-person activity (which he champions).

1. Cognitive vs. Social-Emotional Benefits

CiE research overwhelmingly confirms the game’s positive impact on cognitive and academic outcomes. Skills like attention, concentration, memory, problem-solving, and math scores are consistently shown to improve, particularly in structured instructional settings.

Haidt’s Critique: These are the benefits typically associated with any effective, structured academic enrichment program. If the goal is only to boost test scores and concentration, chess may simply be substituting for another structured subject, doing little to address the deeper issues of fragility and lack of independence.
The CiE Alignment: However, a significant body of research also points to SEL benefits, such as improved patience, self-discipline, coping capacity, self-confidence, and emotional regulation (especially when dealing with loss). These are the qualities Haidt argues are built during real-world adversity and free play. Chess provides a safe, low-stakes environment to experience failure (losing a game) and practice bouncing back, directly addressing the core need for resilience in the “Anxious Generation.”

2. Structured vs. Independent Practice

Haidt’s work suggests that the most beneficial aspects of chess might be found in the unstructured playing—the organic, social, and peer-to-peer interactions—rather than the teacher-led lessons.

CiE Activity Type	Haidt’s Framework	Learning and Implications for CiE
Structured Instruction (In-class, teacher-led lessons, solving puzzles)	Reinforces the “Structured Childhood” critique.	Learning: Strongest link to measurable cognitive transfer (math/reading scores). Implication: CiE should ensure this instruction explicitly links chess decisions (like taking a risk) to real-world emotional resilience (how to handle the result).
Tournament Play (Highly competitive, rated, adult-supervised)	A form of Performance Pressure, which can compound anxiety.	Learning: Essential for teaching grace in losing and delayed gratification (working towards a long-term rating goal). Implication: Must be balanced with a growth mindset focus to avoid reinforcing perfectionism or fear of failure.
Unsupervised Club Play (Recess, lunch, casual play)	Represents the return of “Free Play” and real-world social interaction.	Learning: This is the most direct antidote to the “Phone-Based Childhood.” It is here that children negotiate rules, resolve disputes, teach peers, and build social bonds without adult mediation. Implication: CiE programs should actively measure and prioritize the time dedicated to this type of independent, non-instructional play.

3. Online Chess as a Reinforcement of Harm

Haidt’s central thesis is a call to get kids off screens. Research acknowledges that the most comprehensive data on chess skill development shows that playing more games is the strongest predictor of performance gain, sometimes more so than study hours.

The Problem: The most convenient way for children to play a large volume of games is online chess.
The Haidt-Inspired Warning: If a CiE program focuses heavily on online chess, it risks undermining the critical social-emotional value of the game. Online chess is still a screen-based activity that provides:
- No face-to-face social skill development.
- No practice in physical self-regulation (shaking hands, sitting still).
- A susceptibility to the same attention fragmentation as other apps (being able to switch windows, get distracted).

Conclusion:

The lessons from Haidt for CiE are not to stop teaching chess but rather to reframe its value proposition. The ultimate goal should not be to create chess masters, but to leverage the game’s unique structure to build the real-world resilience and in-person social competence that the “Anxious Generation” is currently lacking. CiE should be marketed as a social prescription as much as a cognitive enrichment tool.

This is the second of two posts addressing the anxiety and powerful social forces damaging Gen Z and Generation Alpha and the ways CiE can help.

Link to post #1: The Devil’s Blueprint for Generational Ruin

Author: Neil Dietsch, Managing Director, Chess in Education – US

After earning an MBA at the University of Michigan, Neil Dietsch’s professional career included information technology consulting, management, and senior project management positions in dozens of Fortune 500 companies. He served as president of the Alabama Chess Federation from 2010 to 2019. In 2016 he co-founded, with Jerry Nash, the educational charity Chess in Schools – which became Chess in Education – US in 2023.