RESEARCH NOTE
Game Night or Vacation: Which Goes With a Closer Family?
In most studies the ordinary evening at home shows a steadier link with closeness than the big trip does. Not in every study.
Two kinds of family time
Researchers who study family leisure sort it into two kinds, following Ramon Zabriskie and Bryan McCormick (Family Relations, 2001).
- Everyday time, which they call core leisure: "the common, everyday, low-cost, relatively accessible, and often home-based activities that many families do frequently." Their examples are watching television together, playing board games, playing in the yard, shooting baskets in the driveway and gardening.
- Special time, which they call balance leisure: activities that are "less common and less frequent" and so bring something new. Their examples are family vacations, camping, fishing, boating, a trip to a theme park, a sporting event or the bowling alley.
The original idea was that the two do different jobs. Everyday time would go with closeness. Special time would go with flexibility, meaning how well a family adjusts when things change.
What the studies found
The first study. Among 138 college students recalling their families, everyday time was tied to closeness more strongly than special time was. On the study's own measure the figures were .36 against .20 (Family Relations). The second half of the idea did not hold up cleanly. The authors wrote that "both the core and balance family leisure patterns were significantly related to family adaptability in similar ways."
Families with a child with a developmental disability. Among 144 families, everyday time was tied to closeness, flexibility and how the family worked overall. Special time was not. The authors reported "no relationship between balance family leisure and family cohesion, adaptability, and overall family functioning" from parents, from youth, or from the two combined (Journal of Leisure Research, 2009).
Single-parent families. Among 362 households, both kinds of time were tied to closeness and flexibility, "with core family leisure explaining more variance in family functioning variables from parent, youth, and family perspectives" (Leisure Sciences, 2010).
Happiness in the United Kingdom. A study of 1,502 people in 751 families looked at each person's happiness, not at closeness. It found that "the best predictors of happiness in the context of family leisure were quality family leisure time spent in familiar activities inside the home" (World Leisure Journal, 2016).
The review. A 2017 review of the whole framework found that in a number of studies everyday time was "either the only or the stronger predictor of all aspects of family functioning" (Leisure Sciences).
The study where the gap disappears
Not every sample shows it. In 884 parents and children in the United Kingdom, closeness was linked with everyday time at r = .34 and with special time at r = .33 (Leisure Sciences, 2016). That is no real difference.
The same paper is a critique of how family leisure gets measured, written by people inside the research group. When they switched to a method that estimates actual time spent, every link shrank, to between r = .07 and r = .23. Their conclusion on cause is blunt: "Causal inferences cannot be made with confidence in the absence of experimentation."
Why everyday time might show up more
Nobody has tested the reason. The studies report the pattern and stop there. Two plain possibilities fit it, and neither is proven.
- Everyday time happens far more often, so it has more chances to show up in a survey about the past year.
- A family that is already close will find it easy to spend an ordinary evening together. A vacation can be booked by a family that is not getting along.
The second point matters. It means the pattern could be the closeness producing the game nights and not the game nights producing the closeness.
What this does and does not say
- It does not say vacations are wasted. In several samples special time was linked with closeness too, and in one it was level with everyday time.
- It does not say a game night will bring a family closer. Every study above is a survey taken once.
- It does say that if you are choosing where to put effort, the evidence leans toward the cheap, repeatable thing at home, and that no study found the big trip pulling clearly ahead.
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?