Online betting causes serious gambling problems for teens
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According to the data provided, teens have increasingly started betting online despite a package of precautions. Instead of playing new releases of SpongeBob games, they are choosing to get into adult entertainment.
Increasingly, teens and young adults have become addicted to online gambling, which is a concern for politicians and therapists in the United States. Helplines are increasingly being contacted by minors as well as young gamblers.
In 2018, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of legalising the sports betting industry. Betting has now become more legal in more than 30 states. Also, there has become a lot of advertising with celebrities. Some states like Connecticut, Michigan and New Jersey have also legalised online gambling.
According to Kate DeBown, a spokesperson for the American Gaming Association, the age at which you can legally engage in online betting is 21, in almost all states. And precautions have also been put in place to prevent underage Americans from betting.
According to the – measures to prevent minors from betting online include: two-factor authentication, location verification, social security number, and matching the face on the ID card with the person who is betting. Popular casino and bookmaker apps like this one – .
Children are increasingly bypassing all security measures, and increasingly it’s parents of teens and young adults in their 20s and early 20s who are being contacted.
“We’ve definitely seen a marked increase in the number of young people calling our helpline and reporting gambling problems,” said Brenner-Davis, a staff member at the Long Island Gambling Problem Resource Center.
Proponents of legal gambling specify that legal and regulated gambling, is better than unregulated and offshore gambling. At the same time, more and more people started gambling after legalisation.
According to research, from 2018 to 2021, the risk of developing a gambling addiction has increased in the country, with the majority being men aged 18-24. Since the spread of the internet, New Jersey’s gambling problem has worsened.
“We get calls to our helpline from parents who express concern about their children gambling,” Felicia Grondin said.
Grondin says the availability of the internet leads to teens 16 to 25 years old in New Jersey seeing at least four ads online each week and that increases the chances that young people will increasingly start betting in the future.
College-age gambling has become the norm, with one-third of students between the ages of 18 and 24 currently gambling in some form online – four times as many as the last statewide survey in 2017 – and 19 per cent are at “high risk for problem gambling.”
Overall, high school students have twice as many problem gambling problems as adults. According to the National Council on Problem Gambling, 60-80 per cent of high school seniors have gambled in the past year, and 14-19 per cent either meet the criteria for having a gambling problem or show “signs of loss of control.”
Problem gambling even extends to middle school, as according to the 2021 study, most boys participate in betting, buy skins and lootboxes in video games, and bet on sports.
In such a situation, it is important to organise effective information for children and teenagers about the harms of gambling. Fortunately, such programs are already starting to operate in New Jersey and a number of other states.
Parents should talk to their teenagers and inform them about the measures taken in connection with gambling, as well as the risks of gambling and betting on the internet.
The problem is hard to notice because teens are often quietly sitting on their phones, and it is not even noticeable to others what they are doing there.
