RESEARCH NOTE
Does It Hold for Step Families, Single Parents and Adoptive Families?
The same small link shows up in single-parent families, adoptive families and families with a child with a disability. For step families there is one study, and it relies on memory.
Who the research has mostly studied
Start with the gap. A review of 181 articles on family leisure, published from 1990 to 2012, looked at who took part. Among the articles that reported it, the samples were mostly White, 82% married, 97% heterosexual, and half were middle class (Journal of Leisure Research, 2015).
A few studies went looking elsewhere. Here is what each found, one family type at a time.
Every study below is a survey taken once, unless we say otherwise. None can show that shared time caused the closeness.
Single-parent families
A study surveyed 362 US single-parent households, asking the parent with custody and one child (Leisure Sciences, 2010). We read the full paper.
Researchers in this field sort family time into two kinds. Everyday time is the cheap, frequent, mostly at-home kind. Special time is trips and outings. In these households both kinds were tied to closeness and to flexibility, meaning how well the family adjusts to change. The everyday kind carried more of it, "with core family leisure explaining more variance in family functioning variables from parent, youth, and family perspectives". Core leisure is the researchers' name for everyday time.
Family leisure accounted for roughly 9 to 17 percentage points of the differences between households in how they rated their family. Across single studies in this field, the usual range is 5 to 17 points.
Adoptive families
A study of 197 US families who had adopted a child of a different race found a positive link between family leisure and how well the family worked. It held for parents, for youth, and for the two combined (Adoption Quarterly, 2004). We read the full paper.
The models accounted for about 15% of the differences in parents' ratings, 27% in the young people's ratings and 23% at the family level.
One caution on those figures. The parent result rests on 158 parents. The youth result rests on 41 young people and the family result on 38 families. Those last two are small groups.
Families with a child with a developmental disability
A study surveyed 144 parents and 60 young people from 144 families (Journal of Leisure Research, 2009). We read the full paper.
Here the two kinds of time came apart completely. Everyday time was tied to closeness, flexibility and how the family worked overall. Special time was tied to none of them. The authors wrote that "the analyses indicated no relationship between balance family leisure and family cohesion, adaptability, and overall family functioning from all three perspectives". Balance leisure is their name for special time.
For parents, family leisure added 15.7 percentage points to what the study could account for in closeness, and 12.8 in flexibility.
Step families
People type "step family that plays together stays together" into search often enough that it appears as a suggested search. The research has little to offer them.
We found no family leisure study of step families as a group. The nearest evidence is a Dutch survey of 5,107 adults aged 25 to 45 (Journal of Family Psychology, 2020). We read the summary of this study, not the full paper.
The adults were asked how often each parent figure did things with them when they were young: school activities, leisure activities and personal talk. They were also asked how close they feel to that person now.
The result: "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."
So doing things together in youth went with more closeness later, and the link was stronger for stepparents than for biological parents.
That is an encouraging finding with three limits.
- It rests on memory. Adults who feel close to a stepparent today may remember more shared activity than there was.
- Leisure is one of three kinds of activity measured. The summary does not report play apart from the others.
- It is about one stepparent and one child. It does not measure whether a blended household feels close as a whole, or whether it stays together.
Other family types in the research
A review of the main framework in this field lists the family types it has been tested in: single-parent families, Mexican-American families, families with a child with a disability, families with a father who lives elsewhere, and families with a child in mental health treatment. It found family leisure consistently related to how the family worked across them (Leisure Sciences, 2017).
What this adds up to
- The small link between shared time and closeness is not limited to married, two-parent families. It appears in each family type covered here.
- Where the two kinds of time were compared, the everyday kind did at least as well as trips and outings, and in one sample it was the only kind that showed a link.
- Nearly all of these studies come from one research group using one questionnaire. The step family study is the exception, and it measures something different.
- None of them follows a family forward to see whether it stays together. That test has not been run for any family type. Our page on whether play keeps a family together covers that gap.
If your family is not the kind most studies sampled, the evidence that exists points the same way for you as for everyone else. There is less of it.
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?