RESEARCH NOTE
How Many Minutes a Day Do Parents Play With Their Kids?
In US homes, play with children averages about 34 minutes a day when the youngest is under 6. Once the youngest is 6 or older it is about 4 minutes.
The US numbers
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics runs the American Time Use Survey. People record what they did across a day, and the Bureau averages the results. Its table on childcare has a row called "Playing/doing hobbies with children" (BLS, Table 9, 2025 annual averages).
Average time per day, all days of the week:
- Any child under 18: about 16 minutes. Men about 14, women about 17.
- Youngest child under 6: about 34 minutes. Men about 29, women about 38.
- Youngest child 6 to 17: about 4 minutes. Men about 4, women about 3.
The Bureau publishes these in hours: 0.26, 0.57 and 0.06 for all adults. We converted them to minutes.
On weekends and holidays the figure for homes with any child under 18 rises to about 20 minutes (0.33 hours). On weekdays it is about 14 minutes (0.24 hours).
The drop
The number that stands out is the fall from about 34 minutes to about 4 once the youngest child reaches school age. Play as a main activity nearly vanishes from the diary.
That does not have to mean families stop having fun together. Older children play with friends, play sports, and share time with parents in ways a diary would file under something else: a meal, a drive, a show. But as a thing an adult sits down and does with a child, play is mostly a feature of the years before age 6.
How to read an average like this
These figures are easy to misquote. Three things to keep straight.
- They cover every adult in the home. The table's own note says it "includes people 18 years and over living in households with children under 18, whether or not they provided childcare." An older sibling of 19 or a grandparent counts. So does a parent who was at work all day.
- They include the days with no play at all. Sixteen minutes is the average across everyone, zeros included. It is not how long a parent plays on a day when they do play.
- They count play only as the main activity. If you were cooking and a child was building beside you, the diary says cooking.
So a fair sentence is: averaged over all adults in US homes with children, play is about 16 minutes a day. An unfair one is: the typical parent plays with their child for 16 minutes.
For scale
In the same table, all childcare as a main activity comes to 1.39 hours a day: 0.99 for men and 1.74 for women. Physical care alone, such as feeding and bathing, is 0.49 hours. That is nearly double the time for play.
Are parents spending less time than they used to?
No. More. The Pew Research Center put historical time diaries together and found that "the time married mothers devoted to child care increased from 10.6 hours per week in 1965 to 14.3 hours per week in 2011, and married fathers' time spent on child care increased from 2.6 hours to 7.2 hours during the same period" (Pew Research Center, 2013).
Those figures are all childcare, not play alone. We found no long-run series for play by itself.
What about the United Kingdom?
The Office for National Statistics compared a 2014 to 2015 time survey with one taken during the 2020 lockdown. It reported that developmental childcare, which covers things like playing, reading and helping with homework, "increased by 169%, from 24 to 64 minutes a day" (ONS, 2020).
Two limits. The release does not give play its own row, and the 2020 figures describe lockdown, not ordinary life. We found no current UK figure for play on its own.
Is my family unusual?
Probably not, whichever way you were worried. If play has thinned out now that your children are older, the national diary shows the same thing happening almost everywhere. If you play more than these numbers, remember they are pulled down by every adult who did none that day.
None of these figures says how much play is enough. They count minutes. They do not measure closeness.
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?