RESEARCH NOTE
Does Playing Together Keep a Family From Breaking Up?
Nobody has tested it. We found no study that follows family play forward in time to see whether the family stays together.
The half of the saying with no evidence
The saying makes two claims. Families who play together are closer, and they stay together. The first has surveys behind it. The second, taken literally, has nothing we could find.
"Stays together" could mean two things for a family. The parents do not divorce. Or the children, once grown, stay in touch and stay close. A test of either would have to measure a family's play at the time, then come back years later and see what happened.
What we searched for and did not find
- A study that tests whether family play or family leisure predicts the parents' later divorce. Searched, not found.
- A study that follows ordinary family play in childhood forward to contact or closeness in adulthood, with the play measured at the time. Searched, not found.
This is a statement about our search. It is not proof that no such study exists.
The nearest evidence, and why it falls short
A childhood study that did not measure play
A New Zealand study followed almost 1,000 children from birth. Mothers reported on parenting and family climate when the children were between 3 and 15. At age 26 the study measured contact, closeness, conflict and mutual help with parents. We read the summary of this study, not the full paper (Developmental Psychology, 2001).
The links it found were modest in size, as we read the summary.
This is the strongest design we found for closeness in adulthood. But what it measured in childhood was a supportive family climate in general. It did not measure shared play or leisure.
A study that asked adults to remember
A Dutch survey asked 5,107 adults aged 25 to 45 how often each parent did school, leisure and personal activities with them when they were young. We read the summary, not the full paper (Journal of Family Psychology, 2020).
It found that "an increase in the frequency of performing a task was associated with more closeness during adulthood, but this effect was significantly stronger in stepparent-child compared to biological parent-child ties."
The weakness is memory. Adults who feel close to a parent today may remember more shared activity than there was. Leisure was also only one of three kinds of activity counted.
A family routine that was followed forward
Family dinner is the best-studied shared routine. One study followed 17,977 US teenagers and checked whether the benefits of family dinners lasted. It found that "family dinners associations did not persist into adulthood" (Journal of Marriage and Family, 2012).
Dinner is not play. But it is the one family routine tested for lasting effects, and it showed none into adulthood. Family play has not had the same test. There is more on our page about the family dinner lesson.
Evidence about couples, not families
The word "stability" does appear in older reviews. A 1990 review said shared leisure "is positively related to family satisfaction, family interaction, and family stability." We read only its summary (Journal of Leisure Research, 1990).
The evidence behind that word is about married couples. A later paper says so directly: "The majority of the family leisure literature is also based on inferences made from studies of married couples" (Family Relations, 2001).
Couples who share more free time are somewhat less likely to split, in studies that cannot show cause. We cover that on the page about couples who play together.
One of those couple studies even points the other way for families. Its summary says that "because couples with children have less shared leisure time, children can contribute to marital break-up as well as help prevent it." We read the summary only (Journal of Family Issues, 1988).
How rarely families are followed over time
The studies we read do not say why the test has not been run. They do show how rarely this field follows families at all. A review counted 181 articles on family leisure in four journals from 1990 to 2012. It found that a "small contingency of articles used longitudinal methods (n = 12, 7%). One article reported using an experimental design" (Journal of Leisure Research, 2015).
Longitudinal means following the same families over time. So 12 studies out of 181 followed families at all, and one ran an experiment.
The 1990 review had already asked for "short term longitudinal studies". It described research on leisure and family bonding as "wanting in both quality and quantity." The 2015 count shows how little followed.
What would settle it
- A study that measures how much a family plays while the children are young.
- The same families, checked again many years later.
- A record of whether the parents separated, and how close the grown children are to them.
- A way to account for how close the family already was at the start. Without that, the study would only show that close families play more and stay close.
Where this leaves the saying
- Families who play more tend to report being closer. That part has support, as a small link in surveys.
- That play keeps a family from breaking up is not shown. It has not been shown false either. It has not been tested.
Anyone who says research proves the second half is ahead of the evidence. We publish play ideas, so we have the same interest in a cheerful answer, and we cannot give one here.
The full picture
This page covers one question. The whole verdict on the saying, with its history and every source, is in our research paper: A family that plays together stays together: is it true?