Many youths who watch the Super Bowl on Feb. 9 will be inundated with ads for legalized gambling. The money spent on those ads has skyrocketed from $1 billion in 2021 to $1.9 billion to 2023, according to Statista, a company that compiles industry statistics.
There will be commercials with famous spokespeople, on-screen graphics, live reads by the announcers and in-stadium signage. The name of that New Orleans stadium? The Caesars Superdome, sponsored by one of the most visible gambling corporations in the world.
“All of the ads and sponsorships in sports stadiums by gambling corporations teach kids that those two things are really linked,” said Megan A. Moreno, M.D., M.S.Ed., M.P.H., FAAP, co-medical director of the AAP Center of Excellence on Social Media and Youth Mental Health. “We’ve seen that before in alcohol research; kids who watch a lot of sports and see a lot of beer commercials are more likely to think that’s a normal, healthy thing to do.”
And like alcohol or tobacco, “it’s hard to make a great health benefit argument” in gambling’s favor, said Dr. Moreno, professor and vice chair of academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “In general, if you get into trouble, the only way to get out of trouble is to go for full abstinence.”
A University of Michigan Health C.S. Mott’s Children’s Hospital poll published in January 2024 found that just one in four parents of children ages 14-18 had spoken with them about online gambling, and 55% did not know their state’s legal age for such betting.
According to the American Gaming Association, sports betting in some form is legal in 38 states and the District of Columbia. Typically, sports bettors must be 21 years old, but some states allow 18-year-olds to participate in online wagering.
While children and adolescents cannot legally bet on sports, gambling opportunities such as Super Bowl square pools are ubiquitous, sometimes even used to raise funds for youth sports activities and favorite charities.
“What you see is what you think is normal,” Dr. Moreno said.
Online gambling may be particularly attractive to youths in the gaming space, where they can build their skills over time and amass more wins than losses.
Pediatricians and parents with concerns about a child’s interest in gambling can talk about the very real stakes.
“Some adults gamble because they like to feel like they’re part of it — and gambling companies will kind of sell you on the idea that doing this makes you part of the game — but you’re not,” Dr. Moreno said. “The reason why these companies have so much money is because the companies always win.”
Adults who gamble know “the house always wins,” but that didn’t stop them from wagering a record $119 billion on sports in 2023, according to the American Gaming Association. It’s easier than ever to place those bets in person or online. Some stadiums have sportsbooks on the premises. In Arizona, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Ohio and Washington, D.C., you can place a bet on a game before settling into your seat. ESPN puts betting information in its score ticker along the bottom of its screen and introduced an online betting app in 2023.
After a 2018 Supreme Court decision that struck down the federal law banning sports gambling in most states, it quickly went from a Vegas novelty to a national pastime. As a result, parents and pediatricians may not be ready to address problems that arise when youths circumvent the law.
It’s much easier for youths to access a gambling app on a phone than it is to sneak into a casino. That is one example of how youths’ accessibility to gambling is expanding but regulations aren’t doing enough to stop it, Sarah Clark, M.P.H., and co-director of the Mott Poll, said in a January 2024 article from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Healthcare Policy & Innovation.
Dr. Moreno said the research community should try to get ahead of the curve.
“It’s probably time for us to think about who’s going to be studying this and how are we going to study it,” she said, “and how do we understand what the impact is on influencing kids or changing their thinking.”