The Risks of Online Sports Gambling
I was seven years old when I made my first sports bet. It was the Super Bowl, and the only thing I knew about the game was that I liked the gold helmets worn by the San Francisco 49ers. Gambling wasn’t big in second grade at Conewago Elementary School, but an adult friend of my parents eventually indulged me with a one-dollar wager. San Francisco prevailed, but the whole experience was underwhelming. I went to bed before the game ended, and my parents forbade me from taking a buck off of our neighbor.
For most boys, sports betting exists at this level of innocence and impact: modest one-off wagers between friends, joining an NCAA basketball tournament pool, buying into a fantasy football league, and so on. But since the federal ban on sports betting was lifted in 2018, a different kind of sports gambling is increasingly available to our young people, and it deserves our attention. In scope and scale, it's a long way from two pals betting a fiver on whether the Yankees or Mets will win more games this year.
While the legal minimum age for online sports betting in the tri-state area is 21, we know that children can easily gain access to it—just like alcohol, tobacco and marijuana. Gambling helplines in both New York and New Jersey report fielding more frequent phone calls from and about teenagers, which suggests that age restrictions are not keeping our young people away from an activity for which they are not developmentally ready.
In 2022, the National Council on Problem Gambling concluded that the risk for gambling addiction increased by third between 2018 and 2021—and that a significant percentage of the increase came from men aged 18 to 24. And this is unsurprising, given that a 2023 survey of teens and young adults in New Jersey found that nearly 70 percent were served at least four gambling ads on social media per week. This speaks not only to the normalization of the sports gambling culture, but also its targeting of young people. This accessibility, when paired with an online environment designed to prioritize dopamine delivery, is particularly risky for boys who are highly competitive, interpersonally disconnected, or both. The author Michael Lewis ruefully notes that 26% of young men—more than one in four—who are exposed to gambling develop associated problems with addiction and isolation.
“All of us can work to create an environment where boys are so captivated by real-world engagement, collective efforts towards excellence, and true emotional connection with others that there is simply no room for online sports gambling to claim an outsized place in their lives. ”
While there has long been a concerted effort at wellness education to intentionally and voluminously teach kids about the health risks associated with drinking, smoking, and drugs, it is not clear that our efforts have yet to address the role that online gambling now commands in our culture and its potential social, emotional, and mental perils. While there will be no magic solution to protect our boys from the risks associated with this new vehicle for addiction, we are not powerless in the face of this threat. As a school, we can continue to build and strengthen programs on media literacy, healthy decision-making, risk assessment, and how to ask for help. As families, we can engage our sons in open, honest conversations about online activities, healthy personal relationships, corporate marketing, and financial responsibility. And all of us can work to create an environment where boys are so captivated by real-world engagement, collective efforts towards excellence, and true emotional connection with others that there is simply no room for online sports gambling to claim an outsized place in their lives.