The Concerns of Youth Gambling from Parents with Firsthand Experience
Published: October 28, 2026
Parents Standing Together is a parent-led nonprofit organization founded by families with lived experience of gambling disorders. Their mission is to bring these parents together and provide a support system unlike any other. The following guest post has been written by parents within the organization who shed light on the unique challenges that families face in this modern day of gambling to help prevent the spread of youth gambling harms.
Football season is in full swing, and in a lot of houses that means Saturdays and Sundays are already spoken for with fantasy leagues running straight through the weeks in between. For many families, it’s the best stretch of the calendar. Sports are how they connect, and there’s something good in that.
Most of us lived that version for years before anything changed. When things did change, we were blindsided. Our kids had a gambling disorder, and for many of us it had started earlier and gone on longer than we ever knew. Many of them weren’t old enough to walk into a casino, but turns out they didn’t need to be.
We’re Parents Standing Together, a community of parents whose own kids have struggled with gambling. Parents come to us assuming the legal age was doing some work on their behalf and that whatever was coming would come later, once their kid was out of the house. What they found is that the age requirement is a rule, and rules are often easy to get around. So this is parents talking to parents. No lecture, no scare tactics. Just what we wish someone had told us back when our kids were still in middle school.
Twenty-One Is Just a Rule, Not a Wall
The legal sportsbooks do check ID, and most kids under 21 can’t open an account in their own name. What they can do is use somebody else’s. An older sibling’s account. A friend’s older brother who takes a cut. A parent’s account, sometimes without the parent knowing, and sometimes with the parent’s full knowledge because it seemed like a harmless way to let a kid in on the fun.
Then there are the products that never required 21. Sweepstakes sportsbooks like Fliff take bets on the same games your family is watching, but they run on a two-currency system that puts them outside gambling law, and they’re widely available under 21. Prediction markets work much the same way. On Kalshi or Polymarket, a kid can buy a contract on who wins Sunday’s game and because these are regulated as financial exchanges rather than as gambling, the age floor is 18. Unfortunately for parents, the state protections most assume exist simply don’t apply.
DraftKings and FanDuel have launched prediction market apps of their own and are marketing them heavily this season. So the same company that won’t let an 18-year-old open a sportsbook account will sell that same kid a contract on the same game — all because the law treats it as a different product.
None of this replaced the older ways in. Offshore sites that ask for an age and take whatever number they’re given. A kid at school running a book out of a group chat, which is often where debts get ugly fast because of no customer service line and no responsible gambling page. And when an app does put up a barrier, kids sometimes find a way around it, whether that’s a VPN, a friend’s ID, or payments routed through something untraceable by parents.
Free Bets, Parlays, and Math Nobody Explains
The other thing working on them is the marketing. It’s in the odds on the screen, the segment breaking down the spread, the ad every commercial break. It comes from people our kids admire, athletes and broadcasters and podcast hosts putting their name on a betting app. A 14-year-old watching a Sunday game absorbs the message that betting is part of how you watch sports, and nothing in that environment suggests otherwise.
The promotional offers do a particular kind of damage. Bonus bets, deposit matches, risk-free first wagers. To an adult, those read as marketing. To a kid, they read as free money, and the first bet placed with somebody else’s money is the easiest bet anyone ever places. It skips past the only lesson that matters, which is what it feels like to lose your own money.
Then there’s the parlay, which has become the thing young people bet more on than anything else. It stacks several outcomes together and pays out only if every leg hits. Small stake, big potential payout, and a screen that keeps you locked in for hours. Four legs hit and the fifth misses, and it feels like you almost won. But you didn’t “almost win”. You lost and the math was never close because the odds on a parlay are worse than the odds on each bet individually. That gap is exactly why sportsbooks push them so hard.
It’s worth saying to a kid plainly because nobody else will: sportsbooks are businesses with a built-in edge on every product they offer. They are not in the business of losing money, and whatever your kid has picked up from the ads, this is not a way to make money and certainly not a way to get rich quick.
Most of Them Don’t Call It Gambling
Ask a 19-year-old whether he gambles, and he’ll say no. Ask whether he bet on last night’s game, put money into a prediction market, or has money riding on his fantasy league, and the answer changes. Betting has become so ordinary in their world that it no longer registers as gambling, a word they associate with casinos and older people at slot machines. So if you ask the direct question and get a no, that answer may be sincere and still be wrong.
Conversations Worth Having
These don’t have to be heavy, and they land better when they aren’t. A few that work:
Do kids at school bet? How do they do it? Curiosity opens more dialogue than warnings. Name things specifically too, whether that’s sportsbooks, sweepstakes apps, or prediction markets. Kids notice when a parent knows what these are, and that’s what makes the rest of the conversation credible.
If you were betting, where would the money come from? What happens when it’s gone? Would you tell me? A kid who has thought about that in advance is in better shape than one figuring it out at two in the morning while he’s down.
If you bet, tell them your limit and what you’ll do when the money is gone, win or lose. Then say plainly where you stand on them betting, before it comes up. Most of us are clearer with our kids about drinking than we ever are about gambling, and that clarity is part of what protects them.
Kids hide this far longer than parents imagine, largely out of shame. Tell them that if they ever get in over their head, they can come to you and you’ll help them figure it out. Then hold to that if it happens.
Use this discussion guide to find more tips that will help you navigate this conversation with your child.
When It Stops Looking Harmless
It’s worth saying that most kids who bet usually don’t end up developing a gambling disorder. But if a child does begin developing one, the early signs are quiet and can be easy to explain away.
Money that doesn’t add up, whether that’s cash disappearing, vague requests for money, or a balance that jumps up one week and is gone the next. New payment apps. Selling things. Borrowing from siblings or friends. Watching sports starts to feel tense rather than fun, even for teams they’ve never cared about, and their mood tracks the outcomes. Withdrawal, sleep trouble, grades slipping. Talking constantly about lines and odds, or going suddenly quiet on a subject they used to talk about nonstop.
Any one of these on its own may be nothing. Together and over time, they’re worth a conversation.
Why This Isn’t Something to Wait Out
Gambling disorders in young people move fast and stay hidden. There’s no smell on their breath, nothing to find in a drawer. It’s often invisible until the money runs out, and by then the damage has compounded. We’ve talked to families who found out through a collections notice, a stolen credit card, a call from a school. Young adults drop out. They take money that isn’t theirs and end up in legal trouble that follows them.
And this is the hardest part to say, so we’ll say it plainly: research consistently finds elevated rates of suicidal thinking and suicide attempts among people experiencing gambling harms, and the risk is higher for young people than most parents realize. It tends to arrive alongside a debt that feels unfixable and a shame that feels unspeakable. That combination is a genuine emergency and treatable when someone knows about it.
That’s why we’d say something now rather than wait. Early exposure to gambling raises a young person’s risk of a disorder later, so the sooner a parent is in the conversation, the less likely gambling is to take hold.
The Bottom Line
If your kid isn’t 21 yet, that doesn’t tell you much anymore. The apps are on the phone, the ads are inside the game, and the word “gambling” isn’t the word they’d use for any of it. Start the conversation while it’s easier, and make gambling/betting something your family talks about before it becomes something you have to deal with.
If something you see or hear starts to worry you, don’t talk yourself out of it. Ask more questions. Look at the money. Put protections in place while you still can. Our support groups are full of parents who wish they’d acted on those first uneasy feelings sooner, before gambling took a much bigger toll on their child’s finances, relationships, and emotional well-being. We hope your family never gets there. But if you do, Parents Standing Together is here. Reach out to us, or visit our website for information, resources, and support from parents who have been there too.
You may also gauge your child’s risk level for developing gambling-related harms by visiting Change The Game Ohio to take the quiz.