The problem with taking a family out to play golf is not the golf. It is the format. Put a low handicap dad, a grandmother who plays twice a summer, a spouse who has never held a club, and a nine year old in the same group, hand them a scorecard, and tell them to play stroke play, and you have designed an afternoon in which three of the four people are bored, embarrassed, or exhausted by the sixth hole. The game itself is fine. The default way of playing it is what fails families.
Between the two of us we have taught more than 10,000 lessons and run a lot of parent and child sessions, and the fix is almost always the same. Change the format, not the people. The right game turns a mixed-ability group into a team where everyone contributes something, and the wrong one turns it into a test that most of the family fails. Below are the formats that work, when to use each, and the practical decisions around tees, holes, and pace that matter just as much as the game you pick.
The Formats That Work for Mixed Abilities
| Format | How it works | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Scramble | Everyone tees off, the team picks the best shot, everyone plays from there, repeat until holed | Wildly mixed groups, young kids, first timers |
| Shamble | Everyone tees off, the team picks the best drive, then each player finishes the hole with their own ball | A family with one or two developing players |
| Best ball | Everyone plays their own ball the whole hole, the lowest score counts for the team | Teens and adults who want their own game |
| Bingo Bango Bongo | Points for first on the green, closest once all are on, and first in the hole | Groups where one player hits it much farther |
| Alternate shot | Two players share a ball and take turns hitting it | A parent and child pairing, short nines |
| Skins | Lowest score on a hole wins it, ties carry to the next | Small groups with similar ability |
If you only take one line from that table, take this one. For a family with a genuinely wide spread of ability, a scramble is almost always the right answer, and Bingo Bango Bongo is the best-kept secret for keeping a shorter hitter engaged.
What Is a Scramble in Golf?
A scramble is a team format where every player hits a tee shot, the team picks the single best one, and everyone then plays their next shot from that spot. You repeat that until the ball is holed, and the team records one score for the hole.
It is the most forgiving format in golf and the reason it dominates charity outings, but it is even better suited to families. Nobody is ever stuck watching their own bad shot ruin a hole, since a poor shot simply does not get used. A child who tops three drives in a row still gets to play from a good position every single time, which keeps them in the round rather than sinking. And it is fast, which matters more with kids than most parents anticipate.
The family variation we suggest is a small rule addition: require that at least a few of the team’s chosen shots over the round come from each player. It sounds like bookkeeping, but it changes the whole experience for a young golfer, because it means everyone is genuinely hunting for the moment their ball is the one that gets picked. When a seven year old rolls a putt to three feet and the whole family plays from there, that is the shot they talk about at dinner.
What Is Best Ball, and When Should a Family Use It?
In best ball, sometimes called four ball, every player plays their own ball for the entire hole, and the team takes the lowest individual score. Nobody’s bad hole hurts the team, but everyone keeps playing their own game.
Best ball suits families where the abilities are closer together, or where a teenager or an improving adult wants the satisfaction of playing their own ball rather than picking up someone else’s. It preserves individual accomplishment, which matters more than parents sometimes realize once a young player starts caring about their own score.
The catch is pace. Four people playing four balls all the way out takes noticeably longer than a scramble, and it means a struggling player finishes every hole regardless of how it is going. A sensible family adaptation is a pick-up rule: once a player is two or three shots over what the team already has for the hole, they pick up and walk in. It keeps things moving and, more importantly, keeps the weakest player from grinding through a nine on a par four in front of everyone.
Bingo Bango Bongo: The Great Equalizer
This is the format most families have never heard of and the one that most reliably keeps a short hitter or a child involved. Three points are available on every hole. One for the first player to get their ball onto the green, one for whoever is closest to the pin once everyone is on, and one for the first player to hole out.
The reason it works is that none of those three points reward distance. The first point goes to whoever reaches the green first in order of play, which frequently means the shortest hitter who has been plodding along in the fairway rather than the long hitter who found the trees. Grandma who hits it 120 yards straight collects points all afternoon while the strongest player in the group collects very few, and everyone finds this hilarious, which is the point.
One rule keeps it honest: play in proper order, with the player farthest from the hole always going first. Without that, the long hitter simply plays out of turn and takes the first point every time.
Alternate Shot Is the Best Parent and Child Format
Two players, one ball, taking turns. One tees off on the odd holes, the other on the evens, and from there you alternate every shot until the ball is holed.
For a parent and a young child, this is quietly the best format in golf. The child is never alone with a bad hole, the parent is genuinely invested in every shot the child plays, and there is a natural, unforced coaching rhythm to walking up to a ball your kid just hit and playing the next one. It halves the number of shots a young player has to produce, which matters enormously for a child whose stamina and attention run out well before eighteen holes do.
It also produces the specific thing families are actually after when they take up golf together, which is a shared result rather than a comparison. There is no scoreboard separating parent from child. There is one ball, one score, and two people responsible for it.
Which Tees Should Everyone Play?
This is the single most important decision of the day, and most families get it wrong by defaulting to whatever tee the strongest player wants.
Set the tees by carry distance, not by age, gender, or pride. The rough guide we use is that a golfer should be playing a course roughly 25 to 30 times their average driver carry, which puts a player who carries a driver 200 yards on a course of about 5,500 yards, and a player who carries it 130 yards on a course closer to 3,500. Most family groups will therefore be playing from at least two different sets of tees, and possibly three, which is completely legitimate and increasingly common.
For children, go further than you think. Let a young child tee off from wherever they can reach the fairway, even if that means walking a hundred yards up from the forward tee, and let them play the hole from there. Some courses now paint family tees far up the fairway for exactly this reason. A kid who reaches greens in a reasonable number of shots stays interested. A kid playing a 350 yard par four from the back tees learns that golf is a long, humiliating walk.
Nobody is filing your family scorecard with a governing body. Move the tees.
How Many Holes Should a Family Play?
Fewer than you want to. This is the most common way a good family golf day goes wrong, and the mistake is almost always ambition.
For a child under about eight, three to six holes is often the whole outing, and finishing while they still want more is far better than finishing because they collapsed. For a child between eight and twelve, nine holes is usually right. Eighteen holes is a genuinely long day, close to four hours of walking and concentrating, and it is worth being honest that plenty of adults who play twice a year struggle with it too.
Twilight rounds are the family secret weapon here. Late afternoon is cooler, the course is emptier, there is no group pressing behind you, and if the round ends after six holes because everyone has had enough, nothing is lost. Some of the best family golf we see happens in the last ninety minutes of daylight with no intention of finishing.
Keep Pace and Keep the Peace
The fastest way to make a family round stressful is to feel a group breathing down your neck, and the fastest way to avoid it is a few habits everyone can follow regardless of skill.
Play ready golf, meaning whoever is prepared hits rather than waiting for strict honors. Give everyone a generous pick-up number, so that once a player reaches a set score on a hole, double par is a fine standard, they pick up and walk to the green. Limit ball searching to a minute or so and carry a few extras rather than combing the rough. And keep the group moving toward the next tee rather than gathering to discuss what just happened.
The other half of keeping the peace is behavioral, and it falls almost entirely on the adults. A family round is not a lesson. If you spend the afternoon correcting your child’s grip between shots, they will not want to come back, and we have written at length about that dynamic in our guide on getting kids into golf. Praise the shots they enjoyed, ignore the ones they did not, and let the round be a round.
Games for the Practice Green and the Backyard
Not every family golf outing needs a tee time, and some of the best ones do not involve a course at all. A practice green and a putter will fill an hour easily and cost nothing but the trip.
Play putting horse, where one player picks a putt and everyone has to make it or take a letter. Run a closest-to-the-pin contest with chips from a few different lies, letting each family member pick a spot. Play par 18, where you drop balls in nine spots around the green and try to get up and down from each, with par set at two shots per spot. Or set out a few targets on a range and play a points game where accuracy scores and distance does not.
These work for a very simple reason: they are short, the outcomes are quick, and a child can win them outright against an adult. That last part is not a small thing. A nine year old who beats their father at putting horse has had a completely different day than one who shot 78 for nine holes.
When Learning Together Beats Learning Separately
Families often assume that golf lessons are something you send a child to while you wait in the car. The version that tends to work better, particularly for younger kids, is learning alongside them, which is why we run parent and child clinics rather than only junior sessions.
Two things happen when a parent learns at the same time. The child gets a practice partner who is around every day rather than one hour a week, which is worth more than any amount of formal instruction. And the parent stops accidentally giving bad advice, because they now know what the coach is actually working on, which spares the child the confusion of two conflicting sets of instructions.
For families whose child is ready to develop on their own, our junior clinics handle that separately, and the fundamentals we start every new player with, adult or junior, are laid out in our piece on golf tips for beginners. Families around Chicago’s western and southwest suburbs can find us year round, indoors through the winter and outdoors when it warms, including at our Lombard location.
Pick the Format, Then Forget the Score
Golf is one of the very few sports a family can genuinely play together, where a nine year old, a forty year old, and a seventy five year old can share the same group and all be doing the same thing. Almost nothing else offers that. But it only works if you set it up so that everyone has a role, and stroke play from one set of tees gives most of your family no role at all.
So pick a scramble or a Bingo Bango Bongo, move the tees to where each person can actually play, plan for fewer holes than you think, keep the coaching to yourself, and let the round be about the walk. The scores from family golf are forgotten within a week. The kid who got to be the reason the team made par is not going to forget that.