If Kids Are Too Young to Gamble, Why Are We Selling Them the Culture of Gambling?
- The White Hatter
- 4 hours ago
- 15 min read
Caveat - Here at The White Hatter, we have helped several teens and their families who reached out to us after online gambling and sports betting had become increasingly problematic in their lives. This isn’t a new issue for us, and it’s a topic we have discussed previously (1)(2). However, what has caught our attention recently is the noticeable expansion of online sports betting advertising and promotion across both online and offline media. From professional sports broadcasts and social media to sponsorships, influencer marketing, and advertising embedded within the sporting experience itself, gambling is becoming increasingly visible and normalized.
For parents and caregivers, we believe this growing exposure deserves greater attention. The concern isn’t simply whether a young person can legally access a betting platform. It’s also about the gambling culture they are being exposed to long before they are legally old enough to place a bet. Given what we have witnessed through our work with teens and families, combined with the increasing presence of sports betting promotion across all media environments young people participate in, we believe this is a conversation worth revisiting, which is why we decided to write this article.
Several years ago, Darren was a huge television sports fan. Basketball and football were regular viewing for him, and like most sports fans, he became accustomed to the advertising that came along with watching a game. TV commercial breaks were dominated by fast food, beer, cars, trucks, sporting goods, insurance companies, and whatever new movie was about to hit theatres. Advertising was obviously part of the sports viewing experience, but gambling was certainly not something Darren remembers being woven into broadcasts with anywhere near the frequency or prominence that we are seeing today.
Recently, we sat down at a restaurant where a baseball game was playing across several large screen televisions. We weren’t really paying much attention to the game at first, but during the commercial breaks something quickly caught our attention. Online sports betting advertisements seemed to be everywhere. Bet on the game, bet on the score, bet on a player, download the app, check the odds, get a bonus, and place your wager. What struck us wasn’t simply the existence of gambling advertising, because gambling advertising itself is nothing new. What caught our attention was how seamlessly online sports betting now appeared to be woven into the experience and culture of watching professional sports.
That experience got us thinking about something we believe parents and caregivers should be paying much more attention to. When we talk about youth and gambling, the conversation often focuses on whether children can actually gamble. Are they old enough to open an account? Can they get around age verification? Can they access an online casino or sports betting platform? Those are certainly important questions, but they overlook something much larger that may be happening years before a young person ever places their first wager. “Kids may not legally be allowed to gamble, but they are absolutely being exposed to the culture of gambling.”
This Isn’t Just Something We Think We Are Seeing
One of the challenges surrounding conversations about advertising is that personal observations can easily be dismissed as anecdotal. Perhaps we just happened to watch a game with an unusually high number of gambling advertisements, or maybe we noticed them because online gambling has become a topic that increasingly catches our attention. However, Canadian research suggests that what we witnessed wasn’t simply our imagination. Gambling messaging has become deeply embedded within at least some professional sports broadcasts.
Researchers examined five NHL games and two NBA games broadcast in Ontario in October 2023, together with social media advertising from ten Ontario licensed gambling operators during the same period. Across that relatively small sample, researchers identified 4,119 gambling messages. Of those, 3,537 appeared during the television broadcasts, while another 582 appeared on X, formerly Twitter. Perhaps the most striking finding was that gambling references were visible during approximately 21.7% of the entire duration of the sports broadcasts. More than half of the television references appeared on the actual playing surface (3).
Think about what that means from the perspective of a youth or teen watching their favourite team. For approximately one fifth of the broadcast time examined by researchers, some form of gambling reference was visible. This wasn’t necessarily limited to obvious thirty second commercials telling viewers to download a betting app. Gambling messaging could be embedded within the visual environment surrounding the sport itself, including signage, sponsorships, odds, branding, and other forms of promotion. When exposure becomes this integrated into the sporting environment, separating the sport from the gambling product becomes increasingly difficult, particularly for younger viewers who may have grown up knowing no other version of professional sports.
Perhaps even more noteworthy, researchers reported that none of the television references they examined violated Ontario’s existing gambling advertising standards. In other words, the concern wasn’t necessarily that companies were ignoring the rules. The concern is that this level of gambling exposure could apparently occur while operating within the existing regulatory environment. That raises a very different question from simply asking whether gambling companies are following the law. If thousands of gambling messages can appear across a small number of sporting events while everyone is technically following the rules, perhaps we also need to ask whether the rules themselves are providing sufficient protection for children and teenagers who are watching.
Gambling Advertising Is No Longer Just a Commercial
Historically, gambling and sports existed alongside one another, but for the average television viewer there was often a clearer separation between the two. You watched the game, while somewhere else people might place wagers on the outcome. Today, that distinction can be much less obvious. Sports betting brands can appear during commercial breaks, on playing surfaces, throughout sports programming, on social media, alongside sports commentary, and within the statistical conversations surrounding games and individual athletes.
A 2025 editorial published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal raised similar concerns, arguing that sports betting advertising had become embedded throughout competitive sports broadcasts and warning about the potential normalization of gambling among young people (4). The authors specifically called for restrictions on sports betting commercials during broadcasts where minors are likely to see them. This is an important distinction because children don’t experience advertising through the same regulatory categories that adults, lawyers, marketers, or governments use. A child doesn’t necessarily distinguish between a league sponsor, a television commercial, an on screen betting line, a rink board advertisement, a social media promotion, or a gambling company’s logo appearing beside their favourite sports personality, or sewn on to their sports jersey.
To a child watching the game, all of these things can become part of the same sporting experience. The team, the players, the statistics, the commentators, the betting odds, the gambling company, the excitement of competition, and the possibility of winning can begin to blend together. When these associations are repeated week after week and season after season, gambling can potentially begin to feel less like an adult financial activity carrying real monetary risk and more like another normal component of being a sports fan.
This is where we believe the word normalization becomes important. Normalization doesn’t necessarily mean that a child sees an advertisement and immediately wants to gamble. Human behaviour is rarely that simplistic. Rather, normalization can occur gradually when something becomes so familiar, commonplace, and culturally accepted that we stop noticing its presence. For a generation of children growing up in today’s sports environment, betting odds and gambling brands may simply become part of what professional sports have always looked like.
Normalization Can Happen Long Before Participation
When adults discuss youth gambling, we often focus primarily on access. Can a teenager download a betting app? Can they create an account? Can they bypass age verification? Can they borrow an adult’s account or payment method? These are important safety questions, but we believe focusing exclusively on access misses another important part of the conversation, “What attitudes toward gambling are young people developing years before they are legally permitted to participate?”
A 12 year old doesn’t need a gambling account to learn that betting is supposedly exciting. A 14 year old doesn’t need to wager money to begin associating gambling with professional sports. A teenager doesn’t need to win or lose a bet to absorb repeated marketing messages suggesting that wagering adds another layer of excitement to watching a game. Exposure alone doesn’t mean that a young person will eventually develop problematic gambling behaviour, and we need to be careful not to make that leap. However, repeated exposure can contribute to familiarity, brand recognition, attitudes, expectations, and perceptions about what is considered normal behaviour.
International research offers an interesting window into this issue. Studies involving young people between the ages of 11 and 16 have found high levels of awareness and recall surrounding sports betting advertising (5). Some young participants were able to recognize specific gambling brands, colours, slogans, and marketing strategies. That doesn’t prove advertising will cause them to gamble later in life, but it does demonstrate something advertisers have understood for generations, that being young people notice advertising, remember brands, and learn what those brands represent even when they aren’t legally permitted to purchase the product being advertised.
This is why we believe the conversation surrounding youth gambling needs to move beyond simply asking whether minors can access gambling platforms. Access certainly matters, but so do exposure, familiarity, perception, and normalization. By the time today’s child reaches legal gambling age, they may already have spent years watching gambling brands embedded within the sports they love.
We Already Know Canadian Youth Are Gambling
There is another reason parents and caregivers should be paying attention to this issue. Youth gambling isn’t purely hypothetical. The 2023 Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey reported that approximately 8% of students surveyed had bet money through some form of online gambling during the previous year, including online casino games and sports betting. Approximately 24% also reported gambling-related activity within video games, including spending real money on loot boxes, keys or in-game currency, or participating in skins betting (6).
There is also some important context that needs to be included here if we’re going to have an evidence based conversation. Online gambling among Ontario students actually decreased from approximately 15% in 2021 to 8% in 2023. We shouldn’t ignore that finding simply because it complicates the argument. At the same time, the 2023 figure remained considerably higher than the approximately 2% reported when monitoring began in 2003. The evidence therefore doesn’t support the simplistic claim that the expansion of online gambling advertising automatically caused youth gambling rates to increase. Human behaviour, particularly among youth, is rarely explained by a single variable.
Although online gambling among Ontario students declined from approximately 15% in 2021 to 8% in 2023, the newest CAMH data show that the trend has reversed (7). In 2025, 12% of Ontario students reported participating in online gambling during the previous year. Even more concerning in the context of sports betting, online sports betting among students increased from just 1% in 2019 to 10% in 2025. Nearly one-quarter, 23%, also reported being exposed to online gambling advertising every day.
For us, this distinction is important. We don’t need to exaggerate the evidence to make the case that gambling advertising around children deserves scrutiny. Some youth are already participating in gambling related activities, while many more are being exposed to gambling branding and terminology through sports, gaming, social media, influencers, advertising, and their peers. Understanding how all of these environments interact is much more useful than trying to identify a single cause.
Canada’s Online Gambling Market Is Expanding
This conversation is becoming even more relevant here in Canada. Ontario launched Canada’s first competitive regulated private iGaming market in April 2022, allowing approved private gambling companies to legally compete for customers within the province (8). Alberta has now followed Ontario’s lead with its own regulated competitive market (9), meaning Canada now has two major provinces where private online gambling operators can legally compete for customers.
There are legitimate arguments in favour of regulated markets. Bringing gambling operators into a regulated environment can create oversight, consumer protections, age-verification requirements, responsible-gambling obligations, taxation, and mechanisms for addressing operators that don’t comply with provincial rules. We shouldn’t pretend that online gambling didn’t exist before provincial governments created regulated markets. Canadians were already accessing gambling websites, including offshore and unregulated platforms. Regulation can therefore provide protections that simply don’t exist within an entirely unregulated environment.
However, regulation also creates a competitive commercial marketplace, and competitive marketplaces require customers. Companies compete for attention, market share, brand recognition, and customer loyalty. That means advertising. Television advertising, online advertising, social-media campaigns, sponsorships, promotional offers, celebrity marketing, influencer partnerships, and other forms of promotion all become important tools for acquiring and retaining customers.
Although regulations may state that gambling advertising cannot specifically target minors, children and teenagers still inhabit many of the same media environments as adults. They watch professional sports, they use social media, they follow athletes, they watch highlights on YouTube and TikTok, they listen to sports podcasts, they play fantasy sports, they participate in online sports communities, and they sit beside their parents while the game is playing on television. Advertising doesn’t suddenly become invisible because the person watching it is 13 rather than 30.
Advertising Appears to Influence Behaviour
There is also evidence suggesting that sports betting advertising can influence behaviour among those who are legally permitted to gamble. Canadian research released in 2026 examined more than 1,800 people who bet on sports in Ontario and Alberta (10). Researchers found that approximately one in five sports bettors were men under the age of 30. Among young men, 77% reported being exposed to sports betting advertisements weekly, while approximately 60% reported that advertising influenced their betting behaviour. Researchers also reported higher levels of gambling related harm and anxiety among younger male bettors compared with the broader sports betting population they studied.
We need to be careful about what this research does and doesn’t tell us. These participants were adults, not children, so it would be inappropriate to take these findings and claim that they prove gambling advertising has the same effect on a 12 year old watching hockey. However, the findings do demonstrate that advertising isn’t necessarily background noise. At least among some young adults who already gamble, advertising is being noticed and is reportedly influencing behaviour.
That raises what we believe is a reasonable question, “If gambling companies are willing to spend significant amounts of money on advertising because marketing can influence adult consumer behaviour, why should we assume that years of exposure have absolutely no effect on the attitudes, perceptions, familiarity, or expectations of younger audiences?” We don’t have to claim that exposure automatically creates future gamblers to recognize that this is worthy of greater research, discussion, and regulatory attention.
Sports Statistics Can Now Mean Something Very Different
Young sports fans have always obsessed over statistics, batting averages, touchdowns, assists, goals, three-point percentages, yards, rebounds, saves, player rankings, and fantasy leagues have long been part of the fun of following professional sports. Learning statistics can actually be a positive part of sports fandom, encouraging young people to understand probability, performance, strategy, mathematics, and competition.
Sports betting, however, can add a very different layer to those statistics. Player performance can now become connected to odds, spreads, parlays, prop bets, and financial outcomes. Whether an athlete scores one more goal, catches another pass, gets another hit, or records another assist may no longer simply determine whether their team wins, someone’s money may depend upon it.
For adults who understand gambling, the distinction may seem obvious. For young people growing up surrounded by sports betting terminology, however, gambling and sports fandom can increasingly become culturally intertwined. Terms that previous generations may have encountered only inside a casino are now discussed openly during sports programming and across social media. Again, this doesn’t mean that every young sports fan will become a gambler, but it does mean they are growing up in a fundamentally different sports environment than many of their parents and caregivers did.
The “Responsible Gambling” Messaging Doesn’t Solve the Exposure Question
Ontario has already recognized some concerns surrounding the potential influence of gambling advertising on younger audiences. In 2024, the Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario introduced restrictions preventing athletes and celebrities from being used in internet gambling advertising and marketing, with limited exceptions involving responsible gambling messaging (11). This was an important regulatory step and demonstrated that concerns surrounding how gambling is marketed, particularly to younger audiences, were being taken seriously.
However, restricting who appears in an advertisement doesn’t answer the larger question of how much gambling advertising children should reasonably be exposed to in the first place. There is an important difference between telling adults to “gamble responsibly” and asking whether gambling products should be so extensively integrated into sporting environments that children repeatedly encounter them while simply watching their favourite teams.
Responsible gambling messaging has an important role to play for adults who choose to gamble. However, from a child development perspective, we believe prevention should begin much earlier than the point where someone is already placing bets. That means teaching young people about probability, financial risk, persuasive design, advertising, behavioural psychology, and the business model behind gambling before they reach legal gambling age.
This Isn’t About Demonizing Sports or Gambling
As with most conversations involving technology, media, and youth safety, we don’t believe fear is particularly helpful. The message shouldn’t be that professional sports are dangerous or that every adult who occasionally places a legal sports bet has a gambling problem. Millions of adults gamble recreationally without developing a gambling disorder, just as adults participate responsibly in many other activities that carry some degree of risk.
Our concern is much more specific. We need to examine the commercial environment being created around youth and teens and ask whether gambling has become so deeply embedded within sports culture that young people increasingly perceive betting as an expected or ordinary part of being a sports fan. There is a meaningful difference between an informed adult independently deciding to place a wager and a child spending years becoming familiar with gambling companies, logos, terminology, promotions, and betting culture before they are legally permitted to become a customer.
We also believe it’s important not to frame this conversation as being anti-gambling. It is possible to support the right of adults to participate in legal gambling while simultaneously believing that children deserve stronger protections from commercial gambling promotion, those two positions aren’t contradictory.
What Parents and Caregivers Can Do
Parents and caregivers don’t have to wait for governments, sports leagues, broadcasters, or regulators to act. One of the most effective things we can do is turn gambling advertising into an opportunity for education. When an advertisement appears during a game, talk about it. Ask your child what they think the company is actually selling. Ask why they think the gambling company is offering a bonus or promotional credit. Explain how odds work and why the mathematical advantage ultimately favours the gambling operator over time.
Talk about the business model. Gambling companies aren’t offering promotional credits, enhanced odds, and bonuses because they want customers to become wealthy. These are customer acquisition and retention strategies. The company, and the government, makes money when customers continue gambling. Helping children understand that commercial relationship changes how they interpret the advertisement.
This is where several important forms of literacy come together. It’s media literacy because young people are learning to critically examine the messages being presented to them. It’s financial literacy because they’re learning about probability, risk, loss, and money. It’s persuasion literacy because they’re learning how companies use psychology, promotions, branding, celebrity, urgency, and incentives to influence behaviour. It’s also gambling literacy because they’re developing an understanding of how gambling actually works before they’re legally old enough to participate.
Rather than simply telling a child, “gambling is bad,” teach them to interrogate what they’re seeing. One simple question can open a surprisingly valuable conversation the next time a sports betting advertisement appears, “If the gambling company keeps giving everyone bonuses and everyone keeps winning, how does the company make money?”
Let them think about that question, and let them work through the answer. That type of critical thinking exercise is far more powerful than simply telling them what they’re supposed to believe.
Parents Cannot Carry This Responsibility Alone
At the same time, we don’t believe it is reasonable to place the entire responsibility on parents and caregivers, although they do have a significant role to play. Families can educate their children about gambling, advertising, and financial risk, but they cannot control every commercial message their children encounter. Mental health professionals, physicians, educators, coaches, sports organizations, broadcasters, researchers, child-development experts, advocates, regulators, and political leaders all have a role to play in determining what a reasonable advertising environment should look like around children.
Canada needs a serious conversation about stronger protections surrounding gambling advertising, particularly during sports programming and within other environments where significant numbers of youth and teenagers are likely to be present. This doesn’t necessarily require banning all gambling advertising, and it doesn’t require pretending that regulated gambling will somehow disappear. It does require asking whether the current balance between commercial interests and child protection is where we want it to be.
This conversation is already beginning at the federal level here in Canada. Bill S-211 proposes the development of a national framework surrounding sports-betting advertising, reflecting growing concern about the amount and nature of gambling promotion Canadians encounter (12). Whatever the eventual regulatory solution looks like, we believe children’s exposure needs to be a central part of that discussion rather than an afterthought.
We should also continue addressing unregulated gambling platforms operating outside provincial regulatory systems. Restricting advertising from regulated operators while allowing offshore and unregulated operators to reach Canadians without meaningful consequences would obviously be incomplete. The broader goal should be a public health approach to gambling that recognizes the rights of adults to make informed choices while providing meaningful safeguards for children and those who may be particularly vulnerable to gambling related harms.
If They’re Too Young to Gamble, Why Are We Normalizing It?
There is a bigger principle underneath all of this that we believe parents, caregivers, policymakers, broadcasters, sports organizations, and regulators need to consider. We often think about protecting children from an activity by preventing them from participating in it. However, participation is only one part of the equation. Culture, attitudes, familiarity, and normalization can begin developing years before legal access becomes possible.
Today’s 10 year old hockey fan is tomorrow’s potential gambling customer. Today’s 12 year old basketball fan is already learning what odds, parlays, prop bets, and gambling brands mean. Today’s teenager scrolling through sports content on social media doesn’t necessarily have to intentionally search for gambling advertising because gambling advertising can increasingly find them through the sports content they’re already consuming.
Gambling companies understand the commercial value of brand recognition, repeated exposure, familiarity, and customer acquisition. That’s why advertising exists in the first place. Parents and caregivers should understand this too, and governments should recognize that simply prohibiting companies from explicitly “targeting” minors doesn’t necessarily prevent minors from being repeatedly exposed to gambling marketing.
Our children shouldn’t have to stop watching the sports they love in order to avoid being surrounded by commercial messages encouraging people to wager money on those sports. Parents and caregivers should not have to accept that saturation as simply the inevitable price of watching professional sports in today’s media environment.
Adults can have the freedom to gamble legally while society simultaneously decides that there should be reasonable boundaries around how those products are promoted in environments heavily populated by children. We’ve drawn similar lines around other products, and there is nothing unreasonable about asking whether gambling deserves comparable scrutiny.
Ultimately, our position is fairly simple. “If kids are too young to gamble, they should also be too young to be relentlessly sold the culture of gambling.” We believe it’s time Canada had a much bigger conversation about where that line should be drawn.
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The White Hatter
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