RESEARCH NOTE
How Big Is the Link Between Family Play and Closeness?
The best single number is r = .27. In plain words: how much a family plays together tells you about 7% of how that family rates its life together.
The number
In 2017 Camilla Hodge and colleagues pooled the results of 23 articles on family leisure into one estimate (Journal of Family Theory and Review). Pooling studies this way is called a meta-analysis. It is the only one in this field.
They found that families who did more together had a higher family quality of life, with r = .27. "Family quality of life" here is a bundle: how close the family feels, how well it adjusts to change, how well it talks, and how satisfied people are with family life.
What r means
The letter r is a correlation. It runs from 0 to 1 and says how closely two things move together.
- 0 means no link at all. Knowing one tells you nothing about the other.
- 1 means lockstep. Know one and you know the other exactly.
- .27 sits near the low end.
To turn r into something you can picture, multiply it by itself. That gives the share of one thing you can account for by knowing the other. For .27 the answer is about .07, or 7%.
So if you knew exactly how many hours every family in a town spent playing together, you could account for about 7% of the differences in how those families rate their life together. The other 93% is everything else: money, health, work, temperament, history, luck.
The authors' own label is "small but significant." Significant means it is unlikely to be chance. Small means small.
Is 7% worth caring about?
It depends what you were promised.
- If the saying is a guarantee, 7% is a letdown. Plenty of families play a lot and are not close, and plenty are close without playing much. One study of 70 families in Turkey found exactly that: shared leisure was low and satisfaction with family life was "comparatively high" (Journal of Leisure Research).
- If the saying is a nudge, 7% is respectable. Very few single habits account for more than a few percent of something as large as how a family is doing.
Three cautions before you use the number
It is a link, not a cause. The 23 articles are surveys. A family that already gets along will choose to spend time together. The number cannot tell that apart from play making a family close, and it cannot say which came first.
One person usually answered both questions. In most of these studies a parent or a teenager rated how much the family does together and how the family is doing, on the same form, on the same day. Someone with a warm view of their family tends to rate both highly.
Most of the studies share one approach. The authors note that 18 of the 23 used the same framework for sorting family leisure. That is a lot of agreement from one school of thought.
The bigger number, and why it is bigger
The same meta-analysis found a stronger link for how satisfied people are with their family's time together: r = .41, or about 17%. In samples from the United States it was r = .56. Outside the United States it was r = .32.
That looks like good news for enjoying your time over counting it, and it may be. But read it with care. Being satisfied with the time together and being satisfied with the family are two similar judgments from the same person. Part of that larger number is one outlook showing up twice. The authors also say that with only nine studies behind it, this result has "limited power and stability."
What it means for one family
A correlation describes a crowd. It does not predict a household. An r of .27 says that across many families, more shared time goes with a somewhat better-rated family life, on average. It does not say that adding an hour on Thursday will move your family by any set amount.
What it does support is modest and still useful: time spent together is one of the things that travels with a family feeling close.
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?