As a middle-aged man without kids, it’s difficult for me to imagine what it’s like to be young and vulnerable to gambling addiction.
Daniel Durkin, an associate professor of social work at the University of Mississippi, doesn’t need to try to imagine. He sees young people dealing with those challenges daily.
“It’s a social ill,” Durkin told CasinoBeats. “There are people who have some pretty serious problems with it.”
Durkin then relayed a recent story of a father e-mailing him about his son, who had developed a gambling problem.
“I really wanted to hear a parent’s perspective on it,” he said. “He said part of what got him thinking about calling me was his wife. She’s a realtor, and she’d just been at a real estate conference, where they had a presentation on young men coming out of college who can’t afford a down payment because of their gambling debts.
“So that’s at a national real estate conference that they’re talking about it.”
Betting on Everything & Anything
Prediction markets have given 18+ year-olds unprecedented access to bet on just about anything. As Durkin noted, that can be problematic given that the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which controls decision-making and impulse control, isn’t fully formed until the mid-twenties. That makes students uniquely vulnerable to gambling addiction.
“I think we need to be doing more about it than we are because I’m concerned that we’re gonna have young people coming out of college deep in debt,” Durkin said. “The other concern, too, is that gambling disorder has the highest suicide rate.”
Some students are exposed to betting before they even land on a college campus. Durkin asks if I’ve heard of Fliff, which uses a dual-currency sweepstakes model. Fliff Coins are used for social play, and Fliff Cash is used for promotional play. The latter allows users to win real prizes and cash equivalents.
“So, high school students are using that,” he said. “Technically, they shouldn’t be, but somehow they are, and my concern with that is they can develop a gambling addiction before they spend a dime. So you do it for a few years, and then when you’re old enough for FanDuel, you already have a problem.”
Commercial sportsbooks aren’t an option until you’re 21 in most states, but young people (and us old folks, too) are bombarded by ads from DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, and others. Bet365‘s new ad features an octopus, and the main character celebrates winning an 8-leg parlay.
Yeah, because those bets are so responsible and easy to hit. The relentless promotion of same-game parlays makes them a high-margin product for sportsbooks and a sucker bet for recreational gamblers.
A recent survey from the National Council on Problem Gambling found that 66% of respondents were concerned about the impact of underage exposure to gambling or gambling-like activities.
The real question isn’t why young people are gambling more, but why we’ve built a system that makes it so hard for them not to bet.
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