Nearly Half of American Teens Gambled This Year. The Highest-Risk Ones Bet With Their Families.

The first national count of adolescent gambling in roughly two decades landed this week, and it found 42.7 percent of Americans aged 13 to 17 gambled in the past year — an activity most of them are legally barred from doing in every state.

Researchers at the Center for Gambling Studies at the Rutgers School of Social Work surveyed 1,677 people aged 13 to 27 and measured 21 activities, from bingo and raffles to sports betting, crypto trading, esports wagering and event contracts on prediction markets. Among teens who gambled, about 11 percent screened as high-risk problem gamblers, the classification that corresponds to gambling disorder in clinical settings.

"We are living in a time where anyone can have a casino or sports book in their pocket," said Lia Nower, the center's director, who led the study. "Now teens who should be playing sports are betting on them, often with family members."

The household is the strongest signal in the data

Among adolescents classified as high-risk, 75.5 percent had a family member who gambled, 66.3 percent believed a family member had a gambling problem, and 61.2 percent had gambled with a family member. Across the whole sample, people who believed a household member had a gambling problem were more than five times as likely to be high-risk; those who had gambled with a relative were more than four times as likely. Just over half of teens — 51.5 percent — reported that a family or household member gambled.

The disparities ran the way gambling research usually runs. Black respondents reported the highest past-year participation at 63.9 percent, and among those who gambled, 17.7 percent screened high-risk, compared with 12.8 percent of Hispanic and 6.4 percent of white respondents. Nearly 30 percent of gamblers from households earning under $10,000 a year were high-risk. High-risk rates were effectively identical for girls (10.7 percent) and boys (9.9 percent), which pushes back on the assumption that this is a young male problem.

Dose mattered more than any single product. High-risk gamblers averaged 6.7 activities versus 2.7 for gamblers without problems, and 52.5 percent bet weekly or more. The newer, lightly regulated products produced the sharpest concentrations: about 40 percent of prediction-market bettors and 41 percent of social casino players screened high-risk, nearly four times the rate on other activities.

What the numbers cannot tell us yet

The release does not print a survey mode, a response rate, or the size of the adolescent subgroup, and 1,677 respondents split across a 15-year age band and 21 activities leaves small cells — the 11 percent teen figure rests on a modest number of people and carries an interval nobody has published. The high-risk classification comes from a screening instrument, not a clinical interview, and crossover with substance use is reported as association: gamblers reported alcohol use at 44.6 percent against 25.9 percent of non-gamblers, and 13.1 percent of high-risk gamblers reported suicidal ideation.

The researchers' recommendations are aimed upstream of the clinic — prevention education starting in middle school, oversight of prediction markets and social casino games that fall outside gambling regulation, a federal regulator with national self-exclusion, and a problem-gambling office inside NIH. For families already dealing with it, the practical read is that gambling addiction treatment exists and that adolescent problem gambling frequently arrives alongside anxiety and depression, which makes screening for both together more useful than screening for either alone.