March brings my favorite family pastime. Soon, the fanatics and ambivalent among us will fill out NCAA basketball brackets and tape them to the kitchen wall. My teen son will carefully analyze rankings for each team and stats for key players. His sisters will pick teams based on mascots and vibes (we saw your 2022 run, Saint Peter’s Peacocks). Dad’s picks will be based on a combination of 90’s glory and a quick glance at late-season records. For me? It’s UVA all the way, always. My son might do everything right, but it’s March Madness, baby, and anything can happen. Thank goodness bragging rights are on the line, not cold hard cash.
In July 2025, Common Sense Media surveyed 1017 boys ages 11 to 17. Using a nationally representative sample, they set out “to understand boys’ exposure to gambling activities,” and asked questions about different types of gambling: online gaming, “traditional” betting like on poker or lottery tickets, and sports betting. Common Sense Media has been a trusted resource for me for years. I often rely on its website to inform my decisions about screen-time or as backup with movie night selections when “everyone else is watching!” Its Betting on Boys report doesn’t give clear guidance for concerned parents like the site’s age ratings for books, shows and movies, but it does help connect the dots between common teen behavior and more troubling habits.
According to the survey, 36 percent of the boys reported gambling in the past year, rising to nearly half (49 percent) of 17-year-old boys. The survey results indicate a strong social pull: 84 percent of boys reported gambling if they had friends who participate. Offline gambling often starts as a social activity with relatives, including things like buying lottery scratch-off tickets at the gas station or, perhaps, NCAA bracket wagers.
Against the backdrop of international social media bans and U.S. court cases about the addictive nature of certain online platforms, 59 percent of the Common Sense survey respondents said that online gambling content “just started showing up”—that is, it’s delivered to them via complex algorithms designed to keep users online and spending money. Boys who see online gambling content—even if they don’t seek it out—spend more than twice as much as those who don’t ($72 compared to $33 annually).
Gambling related to video games is the most prevalent on-ramp, an area few parents and boys even connect with gambling. These boys aren’t sneaking into casinos; they’re dropping a few dollars here and there for random chances to win something in an online game from home or from the lunch table at school. They describe spending money on in-game boosts or potential rewards—like randomized “loot boxes”—as fun and exciting. This may mask the addictive nature of the practice. Once boys start spending, and especially once they start losing money, many move on to more betting, for more money, and tend to lose more.
The survey’s insights on sports gambling came out right before this year’s Super Bowl. They report that about six in ten boys see gambling ads during sports broadcasts. In my house, every single Super Bowl ad block included promotions for sites like DraftKings and FanDuel. If you watch sports, online gambling ads are unavoidable and make it seem like betting is a natural extension of the game. I’m sure that’s the goal.
Adults are monetizing boys’ interests—games, sports, and their social interactions with each other—into something highly profitable, and with serious consequences for young men. Common Sense found that as boys lost more money, they became more likely to say that the purpose of gambling is to “win money” rather than provide them with a source of fun or a social activity. The report authors refer to escalation via “pathways” rather than “alarms.” A boy is unlikely to quickly develop a gambling habit that spirals out of control. Instead, exposure to gaming, algorithm-driven content, and peer behavior inches boys away from a harmless hobby to a disruptive addiction. In the survey, 27 percent of boys who gamble report negative consequences like stress and conflict with their parents. The boys are also using their parents’ money—nearly a quarter who gamble use a parent’s card with permission. More than one in five of the higher-loss gamblers use a parent’s card without permission.
Like many of the boys surveyed, my teen son doesn’t share my sense of urgency about boys being led by algorithms down a path to future doom. He told me that gambling is dumb because it’s a waste of money. But when I mentioned a $5 bracket contest with some adults, he begged to make my selections in exchange for a share of the inevitable winnings. This disconnect may explain the draw of the in-game rewards that so many of his peers bet on, just a few dollars or even cents at a time. It doesn’t seem like betting—they aren’t sticking coins in a slot machine—but the effect is essentially the same.
The Common Sense findings made me second-guess our family bracket challenge, but come Selection Sunday we will still be scribbling out our picks. In our house, watching the tournament offers an opportunity to connect over our shared interest in sports (or, for my oldest daughter, the chance to explain who would win in an actual wolfpack vs. wolverine situation). I can’t block the algorithms or the ads, but at least I have a better sense of what my son is up against.
SOURCE: Michael B. Robb and Supreet Mann, “Betting on boys: Understanding gambling among adolescent boys,” Common Sense Media, 2026.
