© 2020 Dow Jones & Company. All Rights Reserved. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, December 2, 2020 |A
PERSONAL JOURNAL.
FAMILY&RELATIONSHIPS
to the market research firm NPD
Group—as did sales of bikes.
But as the holidays approach,
requests for screens and software
have reached a new level. Allow-
ance and chores app Rooster-
Money looked at items that 47,
U.S. kids who use the app have in-
dicated they are saving up for and
forecast the ones most likely to
top their Christmas wish lists.
Devices and videogames make
up eight of the top 10 desired
items this year, compared with
five in 2017, when the app maker
began tracking kids’ wish lists.
Lego sets and Barbie dolls still
made the cut—Lego was No. 1—but
phones, gaming devices and gam-
ing franchises such as Roblox and
Fortnite dominate. Notably, books
and bikes fell off entirely.
You’d think kids would be so
bored of being on screens all day
for school that they’d race outside
to ride bikes or pick up a book.
Some kids are—I’ve heard from
the parents of some—but they areto provide both physical and digi-
tal experiences,” she said.
Deciding whether to give in to
kids’ tech wishes presents a new
challenge for many parents of
younger children, who before the
pandemic might have been off
screens a few more years. Parents
say denying kids’ requests this
year, when they’ve already lost so
much, is harder than in Christ-
mases past.
“The whole issue I’m dealing
with right now is, how do I temper
this? Do I not give him what he re-
ally wants for Christmas?” said
Ms. Muhleman Jenkins. “If we do
get him a Switch, we’ll have to
come up with rules around it.”
Nicole Pearl wishes her sons
would spend less time on their
screens. But all her 7- and 9-year-
olds want is money to buy video-
game currency so they can level-
up their characters. “You don’t
want to be the one mom who’s
saying no when all the other kids
are playing together, and have
them get excluded from the group.
Their social interaction right now
is all through a screen,” said Ms.
Pearl, a Chicago-based beauty and
lifestyle influencer. “I don’t want
to spend money on toys they’re
not going to use.
Still, she plans to buy games
that don’t require a screen, such
as corn hole, that the whole family
can play together. “I’m not giving
up,” she said.
Even kids who spend a lot of
time outdoors want tech for that.Layla Lisiewski’s 6-year-old son no-
ticed his parents were tracking
their steps during hikes near their
Greenwich, Conn., home, and now
he wants his own fitness-tracking
watch. He is also asking for video-
games and a system to play them
on. Ms. Lisiewski, a mother of four
and co-founder of a digital moms
network, worries about the time
her son would spend on games, but
sees an upside. “It might bring my
kids together because they could
play together versus sitting sepa-
rately on their iPads,” she said.almost as hard to spot as Santa
coming down the chimney.
More often, there’s a discon-
nect between what parents want
to buy for their children and what
children actually want.
“It’s not always what’s on the
child’s wish list that parents are
looking to satisfy. Parents will con-
sider, ‘What is my kid asking for?
What do I want and not want my
child to have? And what can my
child do with the family to-
gether?’ ” said Juli Lennett, NPD’s
U.S. toy-industry adviser. “Kids
may not ask for apparel but the
No. 1 category for the holiday sea-
son is apparel.”
The Lego Group saw a signifi-
cant increase in sales to adult us-
ers this year, as well as families
getting into building Lego sets to-
gether. Nevertheless, says Julia
Goldin, the company’s global chief
marketing officer, the pressure to
engage Lego fans via screens—
from YouTube to app stores—is
palpable. “To be relevant, you haveTechClobbersToys
On Children’s
Holiday Wish Lists
T
his is the first year
Heather Muhleman Jen-
kins’s son, Reid, hasn’t
asked for toys for Christ-
mas. The 6-year-old cut
out a picture of a Nin-
tendo Switch from a catalog, glued
it to a piece of paper and handed
it to his mom.
“He said, ‘If Santa doesn’t get
me anything else, this is what I
want,’ ” said Ms. Muhleman Jen-
kins, a public-relations executive
in Garrison, N.Y.
Last Christmas, there were no
high-tech items on his wish list,
just Paw Patrol toys and remote-
controlled cars. But in recent
months, she and her husband
dusted off their old Wii gaming
system to give Reid and his sister,
Phoebe, something fun to do. Then
Reid saw a Nintendo Switch at his
cousin’s house and decided he
wanted one.
Tech devices and videogames
have been edging out toys for de-
cades, but the pandemic this year
threatened to buck that trend.
There was the puzzle and board
game frenzy of the spring, followed
by a spike in Barbie doll sales as
parents tried to pry their kids off
screens. Toy sales overall rose after
schools closed in March, accordingFAMILY
&TECH
JULIE
JARGONClockwise from top left: Lego
Star Wars, Samsung Galaxy
Chromebook, Pokémon Pikachu,
Nintendo Switch, American Girl,
Roblox avatar and, center, Xbox
controller Minecraft Creeper.“T
he Queen’s Gambit,” Net-
flix’s fictional drama about
a female chess prodigy, has
pulled off an unlikely gambit of its
own: It’s prompted one of the big-
gest surges in the popularity of
chess among Americans since the
days of Bobby Fischer’s dominance
in the 1970s.
The show has become Netflix’s
most widely viewed scripted lim-
ited series, with 62 million house-
holds tuning in during the first 28
days after its Oct. 23 debut, the
streaming company said. (Netflix
now counts two minutes of watch-
ing as a view.) The impact is clear:
Google search queries for chess
doubled from October to November.
Participation in online chess sites is
soaring and it is getting harder to
buy some chess sets.
“We’re setting a new record, for
most new members in a single day,
almost every day of November,”
said Nick Barton, director of busi-
ness development at Chess.com, a
site for chess education and online
play. That influx of more than
100,000 members daily is mostly
beginners, Mr. Barton said. The
newcomers have been mostly in the
18-to-24 demographic (as high asstruggling with substance abuse.
The show feels like a cousin of
Amazon’s “The Marvelous Mrs.
Maisel,” sharing its swanky mid-
century set designs and fashions,
international travel and a strong-
willed protagonist in a male-domi-
nated field. Its impact, though, has
been more like that of “Stranger
Things,” another Netflix series that
is credited with spurring a revival
of the game Dungeons & Dragons.
What is the secret for injecting
chess into the mainstream? “We
had a running joke when we were
making it, that we were putting the
sexy back in chess,” said Bill
Horberg, the executive producer of
the series. “We even had T-shirts
NETFLIX printed up for the crew that said,
‘Sex, drugs and rook and roll.’ ”
The chess prodigy “is the per-
fect character for our time,” said
Bruce Pandolfini, a chess expert
who consulted on the novel and
the Netflix series. “Beth is a tre-
mendous survivor.”
Imad Khachan, owner of the
Chess Forum in New York City’s
Greenwich Village, realized early
last month that the show had be-
come a phenomenon. Working in
the store after midnight, “I heard
the voice of a young woman as
she walked by,” Mr. Khachan re-
called. “She said ‘Queen’s Gambit!’
Usually passersby just yell ‘Chess!’
Or, if we are open, invariably
someone walks in to ask ‘Can I
play Bobby Fischer?’ ”60%), and slightly
more female than
usual, at 25% of new
members compared
with 22% among the
site’s base of 46 mil-
lion members. Dur-
ing the spring, pan-
demic lockdowns
gave a bump to
chess sites, he said.
Jeff Myers, owner
of online retailer
thechessstore.com,
said his November
sales were triple
November’s last
year. Demand is
running up against a
Covid-related supply
slowdown, he said,
and his inventory is
dwindling. “We
source our best
quality Staunton
wood chess pieces from India, and
India has really been locked down.
They haven’t been able to harvest
trees for the sets, and carving fac-
tories for the pieces have been
closed,” Mr. Myers said. His do-
mestic supply of chess boards also
has been disrupted: “The boards I
have coming from New York won’t
last until Christmas at the rate we
are selling.”
Netflix’s seven-episode series is
based on a 1983 novel by Walter
Tevis. Beth Harmon, played by
Anya Taylor-Joy, is a red-headed
Kentucky orphan in the 1960s who
sees chessboard patterns in her
head at age 8. The world opens to
Beth as she advances from local cu-
riosity to world champion, all whileAnya Taylor-Joy, left, portrays a chess prodigy, Beth Harmon, in ‘The Queens Gambit.’Netflix Show
Ignites a
Chess Boom
BYDONSTEINBERGPHOTO ILLUSTRATION/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL|, LEGO; SAMSUNG; NINTENDO (2); MATTEL; ROBLOX; MICROSOFTWant to join the chess craze?
Here are resources:PLAY: Chess.comhas created a
Beth Harmon chess bot that
beginners and experts can play
against. Novices can take on
Beth at age 8; experts can
challenge versions of Beth up
to grandmaster level.
Lichess.org,which recently
reached 100,000 simultaneous
players online, is a free site
where participants can take on
global opponents at the same
level of expertise. It offers puz-
zles for mastering tactics and
variants like Antichess and Cra-
zyhouse.BUY:Stores like New York
City’s Chess Forum are open
and also offer online shopping.
Your Move Chess and Games,
of North Massapequa, N.Y., bills
itself as America’s largest chess
store. The U.S. Chess Federa-
tion, the World Chess Hall of
Fame’s Q Boutique, and
Thechessstore.com offer entry-
level and luxury equipment.VISIT:The World Chess Hall of
Fame in St. Louis physically
and virtually offers exhibitions,
including one on the real-life pi-
oneering women of chess. The
Hall plans to include Beth Har-
mon in a coming exhibit on
chess prodigies.CHECKMATEIT OUT
The holiday gifts children long
for often aren’t the same as
the gifts their parents want to
give. Phones, videogames and
game players dominated kids’
wish lists this year, an annual
survey by RoosterMoney found.Most Wanted
1 Lego
2 Phones
3 Roblox
4 Nintendo
Switch
5 Dolls6 Fortnite
7 Computer
8 Pokémon
9 Minecraft
10 PlayStation