As adolescent gambling surges, experts propose teaching gambling literacy in schools.
“Schools offer, probably, the best way of easily reaching large numbers of young people,” says Isaac Rose-Berman.
Rose-Berman is a sports bettor, poker player, and fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM). The well-spoken 20-something’s work there focuses on gambling research and policy.
According to a growing body of evidence, American teenagers, particularly young men, are gambling more than ever. As gambling participation increases, the risk of harm also rises. In an effort to protect American youth, some experts suggest that school-based gambling literacy and personal finance programs can help insulate young Americans from harm.
Rose-Berman is one of those advocates. He shared his insights with Gambling Insider during a 45-minute call on Apr. 7.
He’s also a person who started gambling before he turned 21, the legal gambling age across much of the US. While his gambling fortunately never went sideways, he understands the highs, lows, and the effort operators put in to keep players playing.
The reason high schools are the target demographic is twofold, says Rose-Berman.
On the one hand, to be preventative rather than responsive, it’s necessary to reach people sooner rather than later. On the other hand, high schools offer a controlled, structured teaching environment, he says.
Problems Can Take Root Early
To Rose-Berman’s first point, research shows that gambling addiction can start in adolescence, before young brains develop fully.
As University of Michigan researcher Sarah Clark recently told EdSurge, adolescents can be especially prone to gambling addiction. Clark said teenagers are more likely to feel invincible and take risks. She also noted that, for the most part, the anti-gambling taboos of yesterday no longer apply.
Less than a decade after the US legalized sports betting, gambling has become a mainstream pastime.
According to the American Gaming Association, before 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned PASPA, Americans spent about $4.9 billion annually on sports betting. By 2025, that figure rose to $166 billion. Today, more than half of the country has access to a mobile sportsbook or casino, and gambling ads are seemingly everywhere.
For many, that saturation heralds an emerging crisis, especially for men and boys.
Over a Third of American Boys Will Gamble Before Reaching 18
According to a recent analysis from Common Sense Media, more than a third of US boys (11-17) will gamble before they turn 18. For 17-year-olds, that statistic rises to nearly half (49%).
(Little data is available on girls and gambling, likely due to stats that show women and girls are less likely to gamble overall. But less likely doesn’t equal not at all. Clark expects to see more girls gambling soon due to the rise of online casinos, prediction markets, and gambling masked inside female-oriented online games.)
Online gaming is where many boys encounter gambling-like systems, with nearly one in four partaking in game-based, betting-like behavior. Of those, most regularly spend real money to gamble, according to the study. On YouTube and social media, six in ten boys see gambling ads. Most say said those ads don’t push them to take part.
Still, nearly one in eight boys bet on sports or participate in “traditional gambling,” like card games or scratch-off lottery tickets. In the latter case, older teens (14-17) participate significantly more often than 11- to 13-year-olds.
Common Sense’s data also shows that for young American men, gambling is a shared activity. Among those with friends who gamble, more than eight in ten also partake. When their friends don’t gamble, fewer than two in ten get involved on their own.
A recent NPR piece detailed the problem: teens are “getting hooked” on gambling, and the addiction often goes undetected.
This gap is where researchers like Rose-Berman argue that teaching topics such as probability and critical thinking could provide teens with greater protection.
Education Offers Counter-Narrative
Rose-Berman, who’s earned his full-time income from gambling for nearly the last three years, doesn’t have an outright problem with gambling. It must be approached, however, with the right mentality. Problems crop up when people go in thinking, ‘I’m going to win money.’
“You’re not,” Rose-Berman adds, “the odds are actually stacked against you.”
Obviously, that is going to result in higher rates of problematic behavior. Someone who thinks they’re winning even when they’re not is far more likely to double down, chase their losses, and exhibit signs of problematic gambling compared to someone who recognizes that the odds are stacked.”
That, says Rose-Berman, is why he supports school-based gambling literacy. It’s not about teaching kids that gambling is bad or will lead to addiction. It’s about equipping young people with the knowledge they need to make informed decisions.
The goal, he says, is for every student who hears him speak to be skeptical of gambling lore. That way, when someone claims they made a bunch of money from sports betting, they’ll know better.
For some, however, exposing adolescents to gambling concepts is a slippery slope that could lead to problems they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
But to Rose-Berman, not speaking honestly about gambling to teens is the risk.
“I know these kids are already seeing this stuff online, on social media,” he says.
It’s not like I’m the first person who’s talking about sports betting or gambling to them. I want to be a countervailing narrative to the influencers and the marketing they’re seeing which is telling them, ‘hey, sign up now, win big.’ Often which is done by celebrities and athletes.”
For Youth, Harm May Siphon Time and Attention
Certain types of gambling have become so normalized (think lottery, bingo, and scratch cards) that we rarely think of them as betting, Rose-Berman notes.
“I know so many people who would get scratch cards in their Christmas stocking … at seven or eight years old.”
Then there’s video games and loot boxes, he says, arguing to expand the definition of gambling.
Every online game on your phone has all sorts of gambling mechanics integrated … I can’t tell you how many 13 and 14-year-olds I know who play video games are doing what would classify as gambling. But they wouldn’t call it gambling, or people around them wouldn’t… Obviously, this is gambling.”
Rose-Berman says his first exposure to gambling was playing Gin Rummy with his grandfather at 10 or 11 years old. While they weren’t playing for money, he says the subtext was that it is a gambling game.
(This author pulled her first one-armed bandit as a toddler under her grandmother’s watch. Later, she hit her first [and last] big bingo win at five years old.)
Rose-Berman is quick to note that “gambling harm” can encompass more than just financial loss. For many teens, gambling problems can look like social media or technology dependency, as the NPR piece pointed out.
According to Common Sense, of boys who gamble, especially frequently, over a quarter experienced stress or conflicts, though most denied serious harm.
Says Rose-Berman:
For a lot of young people, it’s not just the money, but the time and energy spent, the opportunity cost. I’ve talked to students who were gambling small amounts of money, but spending all of their time thinking about it. They’re ignoring their work or their classes or their friends. And that’s really problematic.”
Abstinence Doesn’t Work
Teaching gambling literacy is not a be-all and end-all protection against gambling harm, among youth or adults, Rose-Berman admits. Rather, he says, gambling education should be part of a multi-pronged approach that includes better public policy.
“For any question or problem related to youth development, all of the environments that children find themselves in have to, if not work together, at least be working towards similar goals,” he explained
What isn’t going to work, he says, is teaching abstinence:
It’s the same thing for for drugs and alcohol and sex, it just it doesn’t work. We have evidence that if you teach abstinence, you’re not actually going to decrease engagement with these products and activities. And by doing it, you’re not giving young people the tools and information they need to respond in the real world … If we had evidence that [teaching] abstinence reduced drug use, teenage sex, or gambling we’d be having a very different conversation. But the evidence is pretty clear: it doesn’t work.”
Rose-Berman notes that students have long learned about gambling concepts, typically in math class. But those lessons focus mainly on the concepts, not the caution.
“There is a reason that many of the best mathematicians have used gambling to understand game theory and probability,” he says. “These games offer the best tangible examples of how probability occurs in the real world.”
Reframing the Conversation
Advocating for gambling education, Rose-Berman sees two distinct goals.
One, he wants kids to understand the math and how numbers and probability work. Two, he wants students to know the risks and recognize when someone’s gambling is turning from a pastime into a problem.
“I tell a lot of kids, ‘Look, I know people who are very smart, whose entire job at sportsbooks is to figure out who is winning and kick you off the platform,’” he says.
If they’re still there, he can tell them with like 99% certainty that the sportsbook thinks they’re a sucker. And no teenage boy wants to be a sucker, he says.
“I think a lot of it is reframing this conversation away from individual actions,” he adds.
These are companies that are trying to take your money, trying to take advantage of you. You can gamble if you want, but don’t go in thinking you’re going to win, because that’s what these big companies making billions want you to think.”
Iterating to Keep Up with the Times
Currently, AIBM is working on youth-oriented gambling literacy curricula and resources, aiming to build on what’s come before.
While far from expansive, Rose-Berman lists several existing programs, including the Massachusetts Council on Gaming and Health Youth Sports Betting Curriculum and Be Ahead of the Game (Victoria, Australia). There are also Stacked Deck in Alberta and the YMCA Youth Gambling Awareness Program in Ontario, Canada.
The main problem with these older programs, he says, is that as the industry changes, they become outdated.
When AIBM is considering piloting these programs, Rose-Berman says the point is to iterate.
It’s not like I’m going to write up some curriculum and then we’re just going to close our eyes, give it to everybody and forget about it… The whole point is that we’re going to study how it’s working, and what works in different cultural and educational contexts.”
Especially important, he says, is feedback from teachers.
“I haven’t taught high schoolers before … I’m quite confident in my knowledge of gambling, but frankly, I’m not an expert at all on what works with high schoolers.”
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