Problem Gambling Is Quietly Becoming an Adolescent Crisis

Gambling nearly cost Saul Malek, 28, his life, he told students at University High School in Ohio. At just 21 years old, he was $25,000 in debt and contemplating suicide – a near-miss that followed years of problem gambling beginning with a $10 bet he made on a baseball game as a teenager.

Now he travels the country sharing his story in hopes of sparing the staggering number of adolescents who gamble each day from a similar — or worse — fate. 

“The three big things are drugs, alcohol, and gambling, that parents might freak out about,” Henry Brown, a University School senior, told NBC News. “And I’d say gambling is probably the most common.”

As online sports betting, prediction markets, and crypto casinos proliferate online, so too has the gambling landscape expanded to host growing numbers of American youth.

A 2026 survey from Common Sense Media, a nonprofit dedicated to helping kids, parents, and educators navigate media and technology, found that one-third of boys age 11 to 17 reported gambling in the past year. 

Kurt Freudenberg, now 23, was just 11 when he started trading video game upgrades for digital currency he could bet on online blackjack and roulette. “It felt like a high, an extreme rush,” he said. “I would play soccer and score a goal or get an A on a test — nothing compared to that high on gambling.”

By high school, he’d win — and then lose — as much as $5,000 a day. “Gambling was my best friend,” he said. 

A good number of his classmates were pretty hooked by then too. But it wasn’t until college, when he began neglecting class and basic hygiene to bet 15 hours a day, that his parents even realized he had a problem.

“We thought he was gonna say it was drugs,” Kim Freudenberg, his mother, said. “But he said, ‘I’m gambling.’”

Part of the challenge in combatting gambling problems in youth is how integrated gambling has become within pop culture, experts told NBC. Gambling is woven into the fabric of sports culture, amplified by celebrity endorsements, and casually modeled by adults.

“I’ve had lots of conversations with dads who are openly gambling with their kids throughout an entire game,” said Jeffrey Reynolds, president and CEO of Family and Children’s Association, a mental health and addiction counseling center in New York. 

The most popular apps, FanDuel and DraftKings, remain adamant about their zero tolerance policies for underage usage, and claim to actively monitor accounts for suspicious activity, reporting violators to state regulators.

However, youth say placing bets remains a cinch. Teens just borrow older people’s accounts or even register with their parents’ social security numbers — sometimes with parental permission.

Further complicating the landscape are apps like Fliff, billed as an online sweepstakes, and Kalshi, an online prediction market, neither of which are regulated as gambling companies.

The addiction follows a predictable but devastating arc, NBC notes, largely because young people, especially boys, believe what they know about sports will protect them from losing. So they ride the thrill of early wins, rationalize losses, turn to secrecy when debts begin to grow, and finally enter a full-blown crisis.

“When you talk about the lack of impulse control among adolescent boys,” Reynolds said, “and you combine it with this notion that, ‘Hey, I know a little bit about sports, and I can outsmart the sportsbooks’ — you have a disaster.”

The mental health stakes are severe and underreported. A 2019 state survey of Minnesota middle and high school students found that those experiencing problem gambling were far more likely to have attempted suicide, while a 2025 study found the risk of suicide to increase when gambling addicts are in their 20s.

And yet a 2024 study reports that over a lifetime, about one in eight people with gambling problems will attempt suicide. Treatment centers that once served middle-aged casino regulars are now seeing teenagers.

“In the past few years, it’s just gotten really young,” said Elizabeth Thielen of Nicasa Behavioral Health Services in Illinois. “I had one parent who called whose child went through almost their entire college fund.”