Online betting and gambling addiction increase among adolescents

Experts say young adults and even minors are increasingly gambling online despite industry protections. The growth rate is a concern for parents, therapists, politicians and local hotline workers, who are noticing increasing numbers of minors and young gamblers coming forward with problems.

According to Vice.com, online gaming fever, especially sports betting, is sweeping the country and has become legal in 30 states with more to follow. Some states, like Connecticut, Michigan, and New Jersey, have also legalized online casino gaming.

Although 21 is the legal age for betting on online sports, tech-savvy kids can use security features that often include two-factor authentication, verifying a user’s location, and social Security number. Concerned parents are increasingly contacting gambling hotlines about their children. On Long Island, teens and young adults in their early to mid-20s are now the number one demographic calling gambling hotlines, workers say.

Jeffrey Derevensky, a professor of psychology at McGill University who has studied youth gambling for decades, says it’s unusual. “Young people,” he says, “generally don’t call helplines. » More and more teenagers have also started attending Gamblers Anonymous meetings, says Vice.com.

Even though experts say regulated online gambling is preferable to illegal or offshore gambling, it has also attracted more people. A report from the Rutgers University Center for Gambling Studies, conducted on behalf of New Jersey’s Division of Gaming Enforcement, found that only 40% of the state’s sports bettors wagered before the Supreme Court’s 2018 legalization, but nearly half said they were betting more now.

The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates that the national risk of gambling addiction increased by a third between 2018 and 2021, and that a significant percentage of this increase is attributed to men aged 18 to 24. The organization also found that 60% to 80% of high school students have gambled in the past year, and 14 to 19% meet the criteria for a gambling problem or “show signs of loss of control.” Overall, high school students have twice the rate of gambling problems as adults.

Experts say children have shown the ability to circumvent safeguards and gain easy, anonymous access to their family members’ account information. Derevensky said he spoke to a young man who stole two of his mother’s credit cards and then ran up $10,000 in gambling debts on each of them before his mother found out.

Unfortunately, the trend of youth gambling is on the rise and research shows that children who gamble before the age of 12, even if the bet seems harmless, are four times more likely to develop a gambling problem through following.

Experts encourage parents and teachers to engage with children about the risks of gambling. In Virginia, lawmakers unanimously passed a law that would require public schools to educate students about the potential dangers of gambling, as they do it with drugs and alcohol.

Mike Sciandra, who works at Choices Treatment Center, an outpatient drug treatment center in Nebraska, says the difficulty in tackling the problem of gambling is that it is increasingly difficult to detect.

“A lot of our customers wouldn’t end up dead in a casino,” he said. “But they will be perfectly able to bet online on their phone at any time.”