Watching the Game Together: How to Talk to Your Kids About Sports Betting

Next time you watch a basketball game with your kids, count the betting ads. I started doing this with my own family, and I lost count by the second quarter. Between the tip-off and the final buzzer, your living room has been bombarded with advertisements about free bets, and boosted odds, and turning a hunch into cash. The game is what your child came to watch. The gambling is what's being sold to them.

Kids brains aren’t fully developed until 25. The part of the brain that controls impulses and thinks about consequences isn't finished growing until your mid-twenties. But the part that gets excited about a reward kicks in way earlier. These online gambling ads are built to take advantage of these underdeveloped brains. A "risk-free first bet" hits a 14-year-old's brain a lot harder than it hits yours.

And the ads are reaching them. A 2026 report from Common Sense Media, called "Betting on Boys," found that more than a third of boys ages 11 to 17 had gambled in the past year. For the older teens, it was nearly half. Six out of ten teens said they were seeing gambling ads on YouTube and social media. It's in your kid's feed, and probably in your kid's friend group too. And it's hard to catch, because a kid placing a bet on his phone looks exactly like a kid texting a friend. There's no smell, no mess, nothing to find. That's why you can't sit back and wait.

When it comes to online gambling, your neutrality reads as approval. If you sit beside your child through twenty betting ads and never say a word, your silence teaches that this is fine, that it's just part of the game. Children absorb our silences as surely as our speeches. So you have to speak.

Name it out loud when the ad plays. You don't need a lecture. Just ask "You know they only run these ads because most people lose, right?" Repeating it after the ads does really work, especially over a season.

Teach the math. Because the math is the truth they aren't being shown. The ads show you the winner; they never show the thousands who lost to pay for that winner. The house always has an edge. It is not about luck, it is the design. If betting were fair, the company wouldn't exist.

Be honest about what can go wrong, even the parts that scare you. For some kids, gambling turns into a real addiction. They chase their losses, lie about it, run up secret debt, and sometimes steal to keep going.

Hasan Memon, M.D.
Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist
Board-Certified in Addiction Medicine

Garden Psych
707 Alexander Road, Suite 208, Princeton