As the NCAA college basketball tournament — aka “March Madness” — approaches, what can schools do to ensure students are aware of the risks of gambling, including potential addiction?
Those who work with educators on this issue say more prevention programs are needed. Potential avenues for messaging on the subject include school assemblies, books and videos placed in school libraries, and units in classes like health, math and media literacy.
The urgency of the issue was underscored in a recent Common Sense Media report that found 36% of boys ages 11 to 17 had gambled in the previous year. Nearly one in eight bet on both sports and more traditional wagers like card games, and their behavior is sometimes spurred by video games and social media algorithms.
Michael Robb, head of research for Common Sense Media, said he sees how health education courses could be a good fit within school curricula for illuminating the risks of gambling.
“Kids could learn about the nuts and bolts of how gambling works,” he said. “Health class also might be a place where you could talk about more problematic behaviors, like hiding spending, spending more than you want to, or using sources of money without permission, like parents’ credit cards.”
Plenty of schools have prevention programs for substance abuse, alcohol and unprotected sex, and many of those are delivered through health class, said Jeff Derevensky, professor emeritus of educational and counseling psychology at McGill University in Montreal, and co-director of the International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-risk Behaviours. But relatively few address gambling, despite how normalized it has become and how many adolescents are actively engaged in it, he said.
Health class is “certainly an opportune place to develop or to provide prevention initiatives,” whether in tandem with drug and alcohol prevention or as a stand-alone subject, Derevensky said. “There are a growing number of people who are viewing gambling as a public health issue.”
The International Centre for Youth Gambling Problems and High-risk Behaviours is currently developing a curriculum for the Massachusetts state attorney general’s office around sports gambling for middle- and high-school students, he added, which can be implemented wherever and however schools choose to do so.
“We’ve seen people do it in mathematics classes, where you talk about probability,” Derevensky said. “We have developed a large number of different prevention programs that are used internationally. Some of them are designed for parents, some are designed to be administered by teachers, and some can be self-administered. We’ve taken a buffet approach.”
Robb sees media literacy and digital citizenship as another area where schools could address gambling addiction, given how algorithms tend to surface gambling content particularly in the social media feeds of boys.
“You could talk a little more about why people who do gambling content in videos online … are highlighting wins but not necessarily losses, and how that affects people’s perceptions of how successful gamblers are,” he said.
For younger students, educators could point out how free-to-play video games sometimes bait-and-switch to monetize certain awards in a way that’s not that different from slot machines, Robb said.
“As a kid, you might be tempted to keep throwing money at an app, hoping that you will get a better item or an artifact within the game,” he said. “They’re gambling-like mechanics.”
For that reason, schools’ own devices should prevent online purchases, he added.
Teachers and counselors should pay close attention to students’ behaviors and notice who seems more impulsive, secretive or under stress than usual, which can indicate they’re involved in impulsive gambling, Robb said.
“There might be kids for whom early identification might stop them from spending more than they want to,” he said. “Make clear that it’s safe to talk about gambling with people at school. Even if the school can’t help, they might be able to point you to someone who can.”
