Online Gambling is Consuming My Generation. We Must Stop It Before It’s Too Late.

Scroll through a teenager’s smartphone today, and you are likely to come across one or more gambling apps. A 2025 survey by Common Sense Media found that 36% of boys 11-17 participated in gambling activity in the last twelve months. Even more alarming, the percentage seems to increase as teens get older, with 50% of adolescent boys aged 16 to 17 admitting to gambling in the past year. This is not fringe behavior anymore. It has become the default. As a high school student, I’ve watched this happen in real time among my classmates. Gambling within my age group has spiraled out of control, and major government intervention is needed to protect young men and women from gambling-related harm and addiction.

How did we get here? For more than two decades, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) effectively banned sports betting in most U.S. jurisdictions. In the early 2010s, New Jersey initiated a series of legislative efforts aimed at challenging the constitutionality of PASPA, until in 2018 the Supreme Court ruled in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association that Congress could not prevent states from setting their own sports betting policies. States rushed to legalize and tax sports betting, and the industry quickly moved almost entirely online. As of March 2026, 40 states offer some form of legalized sports betting, and the online gambling industry generates billions of dollars in tax revenue annually. 

While the widespread legalization of sports betting has been a windfall for state governments and gambling companies, legislation has lagged behind. Traditionally, betting at a casino would require the individual to be physically present in a 21-and-over establishment. Betting apps present no such restrictions, allowing teenagers nearly unfettered access to wagers, parlays, and live bets once reserved for adults. Regulation of alcohol and tobacco consumption explicitly seeks to protect minors from the dangers of substance abuse. Yet, legislators have failed to apply the same principles in the case of online gambling.

For years, “loot boxes” and in-app purchases gradually introduced players to gambling-like mechanics long before most of us knew what gambling was. In games like Counter-Strike, players can buy randomized item drops and trade weapons, skins, and other in-game assets for real money. Last year, the total market value of all Counter-Strike 2 digital items passed $4.3 billion. From there, the step to actual sports betting apps was a short one. FanDuel and DraftKings normalized the idea of betting real money on the outcomes of sports events. Newer services, including Fliff and Omada, pushed even further, baking gambling into social, interactive “experiences” with user interfaces and reward systems engineered to appeal to younger users. And then there’s Stake—an online casino that built its brand not through traditional advertising, but by sponsoring some of the internet’s biggest personalities. Streamers and influencers broadcast live gambling sessions to audiences of millions, many of them teenagers. When a popular content creator wins half a million dollars on a slot spin, the message is clear: “This could be you.” 

Prediction markets have added yet another layer of complexity. Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket let users bet money on the outcomes of real-world events, elections, economic data, and much more. Together, they reportedly handle up to $50 billion in trading volume on an annualized basis. Because these businesses are being marketed as ‘truth machines’ whose purpose is to “create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion,” they occupy a legal gray zone. To teenagers—and, frankly, most people—the distinction between “placing a bet” and “trading a prediction contract” is essentially meaningless.

Mainstream sports have also made their way onto the online gambling scene. Despite the NFL’s stated concern for the integrity of the game, the league has partnered with major sportsbooks, embedding live betting odds into broadcasts and saturating gameday programming with gambling advertisements.

The result is a generation of children who first encounter gambling-like mechanics in elementary school, see sports betting being normalized throughout middle school and high school, and now live in a world where a fully functional casino is always one tap away. We are already seeing what unrestrained access to gambling is doing to young men. According to a 2024 FDU poll, 10% of men aged 18 to 30 gamble at problematic levels, compared to just 3% of the overall population. The issue carries broader societal consequences. For example, data suggests that personal bankruptcies have risen by 25% to 30% in states that legalized online sports betting, and calls to problem gambling hotlines have increased by 314% since Ohio legalized the practice in 2023.

Business interests and lobbyists will point out that betting apps require users to be 18 or 21 to register. But age verification online is notoriously easy to circumvent. More importantly, the behavioral conditioning that makes gambling attractive begins years before anyone creates an account.

The good news is that we know how to fix this, because we have done it before. Tobacco companies once marketed cigarettes to children—openly and aggressively. We did not ban cigarettes, but we did prohibit the targeting of minors. We restricted advertising, required age verification at the point of sale, and held retailers accountable. We did the same with alcohol. The framework already exists. We simply need the political will to see these much-needed reforms through.

Digital stores and mobile carriers should provide parents with robust tools to block gambling apps, not just flag them. Gambling advertisements should incur the same restrictions as tobacco and alcohol ads: no placements during programming that reaches minors, no sponsorships aimed at youth audiences, and no streamers being paid to normalize betting to their teenage followers. Loot boxes and gacha mechanics in video games must be heavily regulated instead of being left to voluntary industry standards. And prediction markets must not be allowed to operate in regulatory gray zones.

The recent surge in gambling activity is not a coincidence. It is the product of the concerted effort of savvy business operators who have spent years and billions of dollars cultivating a new generation of customers. We have long believed that protecting young people from addictive, high-risk activities is both a legal and moral imperative. It is time we extend those same safeguards to the young men and women who are being relentlessly targeted by a predatory industry that treats addiction as a business model.

Henry Russell is a sophomore at Tandem Friends School in Charlottesville, Virginia