Gambling: The New Teen Epidemic

We opened this Pandora's box in the name of funding schools. Bad call.

In 1964, New Hampshire became the first state to approve a lottery.

It seemed like a no-brainer. Millions of Americans were gambling illegally through numbers games and other lightly policed amusements. The proceeds went to criminals. Why not bring this activity out of the shadows and into the civic domain where it could be appropriately regulated - and taxed?

Even better, the revenue from lottery sales would fund schools. It’s not a vice if it benefits kids, right?

By starting lotteries, states didn’t just legalize gambling; they endorsed it. They advertised it. They provided moral cover by tying it to education. Spending a few dollars on a scratcher wasn’t a shady thrill—it was charity.

One state after another approved its own lottery. There are now 45 of them.¹

Except this turned out to be a public con. Lottery revenues rarely increased overall education funding. Instead, they replaced general fund dollars, freeing up politicians to spend on other priorities without having to raise taxes.

Even worse, lotteries are regressive. Poorer households buy more tickets as a share of income. If a governor explicitly proposed funding schools through a mechanism that disproportionately extracted money from struggling families, the idea would have been laughed out of the room. Yet lotteries got a pass. Over time, they normalized gambling as a household pastime.

Gambling is now omnipresent. Thirty-eight states have casinos. Following a 2018 Supreme Court decision that struck down a federal ban on sports betting, 40 states legalized it.

An example of changing mores: In 1979, gambling was so taboo that Willie Mays lost his job as the Mets hitting instructor for working in a public relations role at an Atlantic City casino. Today, every other television commercial is LeBron James promoting DraftKings’ NFL betting platform - and he’s still an active NBA player.

Industry lobbyists and elected officials have told us not to worry about all this gambling: it’s regulated, it’s voluntary, and the harms are manageable, they say.

I disagree. Ubiquitous gambling has been a disaster for kids. And it’s rapidly getting worse.

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Gambling has come for the boys in a big way

Common Sense Media just did an eye-opening new survey focused on boys, who are significantly more likely to gamble than girls.² Highlights:

• Teen gambling has become alarmingly commonplace. Half of boys aged 16-17 report gambling in the past year - more than are using alcohol, nicotine, or marijuana.

Source: Common Sense Media

• Gambling is baked into video games. Some teen bettors participate in traditional games like poker (online or in-person) or purchase scratch-off tickets.³ Others bet on sports through season-long fantasy leagues, March Madness pools, or single-game wagers. But the most prevalent form of teen betting is trading real money for random, chance-based rewards while playing video games or trading/betting in-game items that were acquired using real money. Examples of popular titles with such features include Counter-Strike 2 and EA Sports FC.⁴

• Social media touts gambling constantly. According to Common Sense, almost half of boys who gamble say they view gambling videos or streams online. That tracks - they are interested in the topic. But here’s something strange: most of the boys say this content “just started showing up” before they searched for it or followed accounts related to it. Sixty percent of boys now say they see ads for online gambling on YouTube and social media. One hundred percent of those boys are underage. Additionally, major players like DraftKings pour money into the sponsorship of influencers who are old enough to gamble - but whose audiences include many who are not. Betting is so much a part of Barstool Sports that it was purchased in 2020 by a gaming company.⁵

• Peers are a huge influence. Boys whose friends gamble are more likely to follow suit. They also tend to gamble with greater frequency and suffer consequences such as financial hardship and tension at home.

Gambling is following the social media path. As Jonathan Haidt has argued, no one was ready for the damage wreaked on teen mental health after online platforms introduced features like retweeting and liking posts. Initial regulation and oversight were zilch. It took years for us to realize that our teens were phone-addicted and miserable. The horse had long since decamped the barn.

It’s happening again.

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Gambling is an education issue

As you would expect, a teen gambling habit is academically unhealthy. Even so, I was surprised at how few studies have examined education effects for American high school students. When we add findings related to college students and research from other countries, it gets a little clearer. Gambling is associated with:

• Weaker school performance

• Higher absenteeism and disengagement

• Greater stress and anxiety

• Increased likelihood of other unsafe behaviors

For some adolescents, gambling competes on a daily basis with homework for attention. It stokes dopamine systems already overstimulated by phones. And it instills risk-taking that undermine the habits schools are trying to teach. That’s the cost for kids.

But schools and educators are getting the shaft here, too. They endure the consequences of student gambling despite lacking any ability to curtail teen exposure.

It is parents, after all, who often socialize gambling to their kids by discussing their own wagers. Some even allow their children to bet underage on their accounts.

It is policymakers who legalized betting, swept the cash into their coffers, and scurried away without adding appropriate safeguards. Most states:

• Do not include gambling in student health surveys

• Do not provide schools with guidance or curricula on gambling literacy

• Do not train counselors to identify gambling-related harms

• Do not restrict gambling advertising in spaces where teens spend their time

We would never ask schools to address vaping, drug use, or social media addiction with so little data and so few tools. But with gambling, that’s pretty much what we’ve done.

It’s not working. These teens who develop a gambling habit aren’t likely to grow out of it when they graduate high school. Approximately six percent of today’s college students are problem gamblers - twice the rate of the national population.

Recommendations

We need a more robust plan for protecting our kids from a world where they are destined to be surrounded by gambling 24/7. Here are a few ideas:

1. Treat youth gambling like substance abuse. Invest proactively in prevention. Add gambling to the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS). Build treatment infrastructure. Get serious.⁶

2. Ban or severely restrict sports gambling advertising where teens are watching. No more quippy Kevin Hart/LeBron banter to sell DraftKings during Sunday afternoon NFL broadcasts. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but let’s go back to insurance and truck commercials. Take the social media companies to the woodshed if they are allowing the algorithm to flood teen users with gambling content.

3. Raise the bar on age verification. Current safeguards barely qualify as a joke. Any app with gambling-adjacent features should require upload of a government ID with a selfie match, periodic re-verification, and - most importantly - confirmation that the device installing the app is registered to someone of legal age. Pull apps from the store if their audited fail rate is too high.

4. Hold parents accountable. Parents who provide alcohol and drugs to teens are often prosecuted. We may need some of the same approach to deter parents who facilitate underage gambling.

5. Require the gaming companies to fund gambling education. This should happen in middle school and include information about the risks/consequences of addiction and support to identify common on-ramps to gambling such as video game features.

6. Stop using education as political cover. Gambling revenue shouldn’t pay for schools. Just stop. It’s a flimsy cover. If states want to allow gambling for adults, fine, I’m not trying to be a prude about it. But kids should have good schools because education is a top priority, not because the government preys upon the addictive vulnerability of lower income citizens.

If we do nothing, I fear that we’re going to see a stream of ugly stats and headlines for years to come - and there will be a generation of young adults asking us why we didn’t help them miss this iceberg dead ahead. Let’s step up.

1. WGBH in Boston produced a fantastic podcast series on lotteries, Scratch and Win, that I cannot recommend highly enough. You should also subscribe to Boston Focus, by Will Austin, who has written often about the links between gambling and education, including puncturing common myths. Why so much attention on lotteries in Massachusetts? Its residents spend the bonkers average amount of $915 per year on tickets - far more than anywhere else.

2. Research from the U.S. as well as other countries such as Sweden and Italy finds boys gamble more frequently and are more likely to be problem gamblers.

3. Platforms like Club GG allow users to create their own poker games. A kid can collect cash from his friends and then allocate in-game chips to the players accordingly. The company can claim it is not facilitating gambling because none of the real money flows through them.

4. Additionally, several games have removed gambling features after criticism, including big names like Fortnite and Rocket League.

5. Penn Entertainment later sold Barstool back to its founder.

6. The teens may be more serious than we are. A rural Maine high school student, Carter Bennett, has started a peer-to-peer program, GameChangers, to divert youth from problem gambling after hearing his classmates constantly bemoan their NFL losses. He has support from Aspen’s Center for Rising Generations. Go get ‘em, Carter.