Episode five. Gambling & young people with Gamble Aware
Episode five of EPIC Conversations addresses the topic of gambling and young people. We invited Cathy Willis, Community Linker from Gamble Aware, to speak on this topic.
Mad’s top take outs:
Contributing factors for youth gambling include games on phones, gaming on your computer, social media, TV advertising, peer pressure, parental influence and attending sporting events.
Parents and carers are great role models when they are aware of gambling influences and avoid it themselves :)
There is hope! Good support, awareness, open communication and maturity often see young people realising that gambling is a negative choice.
1. Cathy, can you please explain who Gamble Aware is and what their role is in our community.
C: Gamble Aware is a free gambling counselling service and free financial gambling counseling service, which is available to anybody impacted by problem gambling. So, it doesn't have to be the gambler themselves, it could be other people, it could be friends, family. It could even be work colleagues. Anyone that's feeling some kind of impact by somebody who's gambling.
2. What is your role at Gambled Aware?
C: I have the fun job at Gamble Aware. So I'm not one of the counsellors, my job is all about community education and engagement. I do a range of different things to raise awareness that the service exists so that people know that they can access it. Or I do a lot of different activities to try and raise awareness about gambling harm and get people talking about gambling harm minimization.
3. How does Gambled Aware support young people in their families?
In terms of supporting young people, most of the stuff that Gambler Aware does is through the community engagement. So there's a lot of discussion about stuff going into schools at the moment, talking with school teachers talking, talking with kids.
I did something a few weeks ago where I did a workshop with very young children about gambling, where what we actually did was, we just looked at what could be on sports jerseys, instead of gambling. So we just looked at what is fun. Just to try and get this idea that gambling doesn't need to be in all aspects of life.
In terms of support for young people, sadly, our gambling counseling services are only available for people over the age of 18. So whilst we can't actually counsel a child, if you are the parent or care of a child and you're concerned about their gambling, we can actually cancel counsel you and work with you on strategies to help them.
I think as well it's really worth remembering that with problem gambling it's usually intergenerational as well. It's very, very common so there might be somebody else within the family, and not necessarily the young person you were thinking about that requires the counseling.
4. There are some startling statistics relating to what age children start gambling. How common is youth gambling and what do we know about what age children start.
There is some very shocking statistics about this. Generally when I say this particular statistic it kind of makes a room go ahhhhh. Which is that the average age that young person first Gamble's in Australia is 11.6 years old. Obviously very very young and quite often when I say that people are a bit like, how is that possible, because obviously it's not legal to gamble till your 18. But generally the first time a young person gamble's it's with an adult. So, it is usually their parent, or sometimes their grandparents or an older sibling, generally the people that they might be gambling with. So that gambling could be something where they have been given money by an adult and adult has helped them put it back on. And again, when you're listening to me saying that you're thinking that sounds a bit crazy, but have to think about things like have you ever asked a child to pick the numbers for the lottery. Have you ever asked a child, what horses do you think I should put a bet on the Melbourne Cup. Have you ever said to a child. Oh, yeah, you can. Which team do you think is going to win the grand final. All of those things are talking about gambling. And it is becoming more and more common for parents and carers to let young people use things like their sports bed accounts on their phones, a half. So becoming very very common. And so, yes, very very young, that people tend to stay in Australia.
And I've also heard some really shocking stories like kind of shocking to me, because I'm an immigrant so I heard a lot of this and going oh my god this is really crazy but when I've shared them with other people they've gone Oh yeah that happened to me, which is things like, I'm betting in school when it's Melbourne Cup in primary schools. Kids are encouraged to take part in sweepstakes, and somebody was telling me about this happening quite recently in their kids school and they complained to the principal and they pretty much got laughed out for bringing it up until it that's just a normal thing we do in Australia.
And in terms of how prevalent youth gambling is, it's way, way more common than you think it is. So, I know a lot of parents might kind of tune into this and think, oh, that's not really a concern with my kids, but actually your kids are exposed to gambling, all the time within our culture. So there was a study back in 2020 for New South Wales for the NSW youth gambling study, and of the young people interviewed during that one third of them said that they were gambling. So that's quite a lot and. And I know personally when I've had conversations with kids, one of the things that really has surprised me, and I know a lot about gambling, is how many kids gamble in their school on school time. And so, what you were saying earlier saying like we did these things for fun when I was young, but now kids have got mobile phones on them all the time so if you have got access to a phone you've got access to 24 seven gambling.
EPIC: So they can create their own gambling circle, that makes sense.
5. What do you think are some of the contributing factors that engage and people were gambling?
There are so so many, so I'm not going to put these in any particular order, because different young people are interested in different things so they'll get exposure through different avenues.
The mobile phone is the first one. There are a lot of free games on mobile phones that have gotten gambling elements in them. The most common thing is something that's got what we call a loot box with which is something you might win or you can pay money for, and you are hoping that when you open it you win something that's good for you in the game. That's quite common in free games. There are a lot of those free games that look kind of like poker machines when you play them, and little casino things as well because that they are free people often think they're harmless but a lot of its training the brain, about gambling, and also a lot of those things if you want to progress. They will give you the option of paying more money to progress.
EPIC: They encourage you to stay on there as well don't they? Come back as much as possible, keep going back.
C: Yes, yes. That's very easily accessible it's free it's on a phone.
Then you've got similar stuff in video games. So again, loot boxes are really common in video games. The other thing that's really common is something called skins. Skins are like a graphic that you can win or purchase it within a game to make characters better so it could be something like a weapon or outfit or something like that. And, that can be perfectly innocent within a video game, or you are able to take those things from some games to external websites and you're able to trade them so you can actually use those to play on online casinos. And you can also use them to bet on eSports as well. And a lot of those, and I won’t go into this too much, but a lot of those things are not regulated because they're not based within Australia as well. And so, plenty of stories of people losing money through that access. So you've got all of that stuff in video games.
And then if you haven't got a kid that into gaming, you've got social media. So, there are some laws around things like whether celebrities are allowed to promote gambling things. So there's a bit of controversy a while back about Kim Kardashian on promoting Bitcoin and not saying that she was being paid to promote it and there's a big debate about whether Bitcoin is gambling or not. But I'm not going to get into that one. But if you're not a young person you're probably not even aware that there are all these influences in gambling online as well. There are actually people who are paid to gamble online, and people actually watch that. For a lot of young people, they don't necessarily make the connection that those people are not gambling their own money. They're being paid to lose thousands or win thousands and make it look appealing so often you don't make that connection. And so, there's some crazy ones of like influences that open live loot boxes that are life size, that’s a very common one with influences, and then things like eSports and betting on eSports is really really common so again there are influences on eSports and you can watch all of that as well.
If you go away from social media, and you've got regular TV advertising or radio advertising. And so, there has been a study at Wesley Mission tracking how much broadcast, and gambling advertising there is. And that is 13,000 adverts per week. Yes, 13,000 a week is insane and we're pretty sure that just looking at broadcast media and not other stuff that young people are using. And so if you watch any terrestrial TV, you are going to see a gambling ad. There are laws around when gambling adverts can be shown. But they are kind of complicated and patchy so they all relate to, you can't show gambling adverts at a time slot that is aimed at children or during a program is aimed at children, but there are plenty of things that a young person might watch that are not targeted at them, that there's no rules around so say for example, five o'clock you watch the chase, young person may watch that. And there's no laws around whether or not that can be gambling ads in that time slot on that program. So, very common.
The other two things that really really need to be considered are peer pressure and parental influence. So one of the things that really really concerns me personally in terms of TV advertising about gambling is if you look at a lot of the adverts for things like online sports betting. If you look at a lot of the adverts for things like online sports betting. They are targeted at young men in that kind of 18 to 25 year old age bracket. And a lot of them are things like them standing around in the pub looking at their phone all betting together. And so it's kind of normalising this idea that to be part of the group when you're a young man this is how you socialise. This is how you're part of the team. This is norm, the normalisation. And I do think with men, like with boys in that kind of age group. They do succumb to peer pressure easier. So, if their mates are it doing it and they're seeing it normalised on TV. There's a quite high up chance that they're going to do it as well. Just because they want to be part of the group.
Then the final factor in terms of where people are actually seeing gambling comes back to something I was talking about before, which comes down to parental influence, which in some ways is one of the biggest factors about whether young people gamble or not so the attitude of their parents or carers, and has a massive massive influence on whether young people actually gamble or not. And so, the contributing factors to a young person developing a gambling problem, if they've grown up in a household where there is some kind of trauma or they just haven't been taught really good coping skills to deal with issues, and they've got a parent or carer who uses gambling themselves in some way either as a coping strategy for escapism anything like that. And, and they have seen advertising that basically promotes gambling in a positive light. That is your recipe for becoming a problem gambler.
EPIC: This is a lot of information, I did jot it down. So you the games on your phone, gaming on your computer, social media, TV, peer pressure, parental. It is a lot. It's no wonder that there's so much gambling going on. Okay, so what do you think parents and kids.
C: In that I've even forgotten, just basic watching sport.
EPIC: yes. on a jersey you could be there physically at a match and you can be exposed to it.
C: Yeah, so I think it's kind of sad that the current generation of young people, basically the first generation that don't know that sport and betting don't go hand in hand.
6. So what can parents and carers do if they are concerned about their young person gambling?
The first thing that you can actually do is you really need to have this conversation before you think that young person has got a problem. So, you really need to find out what they think about gambling and I find with this, when they ask us what can parents or carers do they always want us to give an immediate solution to stop gambling, but actually it's all about connecting with that young person and getting into a situation where they feel they can talk to you about stuff. So, if for example you have a child who is really into gaming, you need to get really into gaming, as the, as their carer. So you need to sit down, you need to play those games with them and you need to work out. Is there a gambling element in this? And there might be and that young person might not have noticed, but sitting there and playing it getting interested in what they're doing, you can start up a conversation about it.
Same thing if you've got a kid that is really into sports, sit down and watch a match with them. You will be bombarded during that match with information about gambling, use it as an opportunity to speak to them about it. So, whatever you think they're doing if they're playing games on their phone. Find out what game they're playing with them, whatever it is. And because if they see that you're interested in what they're doing, they're more likely to open up to you.
If you are at that point already where you're kind of going I know that my child has got a problem. One of my favorite pieces of advice from one of our counselors is have conversations with teenagers, when they're in the car. Because you both get to look forward, you don't have to look at each other, it's not confrontational, and it's a much more safe space to have a conversation. If you are going to have a conversation about gambling though it is really really important that you are not confrontational and you're not judgmental about it. People do get very secretive around gambling. Do get very very moody and they do get very irritable.
And just also bear in mind, we have this message in a lot of advertising around gambling which is gamble responsibly, which has kind of taught a lot of people everybody else is fine with this, so I can't admit that I've got a problem. And so you need to be very very gentle in how you approach it. The biggest thing is just find an opportunity where you can talk to them about it, pick your timing, listen to what they actually say. And I think as well with some kids you might be surprised what they say about gambling. They might say things like they are being peer pressured into gambling and it might not be something they want to do and they might be annoyed by all the tv adverts about it as well. So, pick your moment and be gentle and just listen.
Be gentle and just listen. But when it comes to any kind of addiction behavior as well, what your role modeling is really really important as well.
7. What if a young person has a friend and they suspect that they have a gambling problem, is there ways that we can suggest if our young person comes home and says hey xxx I think has a problem with gambling can we suggest ways that a young person can help another young person?
This is a great question because some of these friends might notice that they're gambling way before their parents or caregivers might notice it because they're going to have more daily interaction. I have certainly heard kids joking about how their friends got a gambling problem and stuff like that so it's not uncommon. The good thing about young people today, is that they have been brought up with this idea that you can speak about mental health which is, sort of big change from like even 10-15 years ago. That it's okay to be asking, Are you okay, so when it gets to kind of level of addiction, you need to think of it as a mental health concern.
Again it comes down to picking the right moment. It’s not a good idea to speak to somebody when they are actually gambling or while they are around other friends where they'll feel judged or anything like that. But if they're seeing other behaviors. So, if they're seeing that person's having mood swings or getting depressed or anything like that. They can take them aside and just be like, hey I'm a bit worried about you at the moment you seem down, and have a conversation that more focuses on mental health.
I have noticed as well with conversations I've had with teenagers, and often they've said something like, they've noticed gambling that they've been doing, so for example, I spoke to a young man, few weeks ago who was 15. He told me that he had previously had a gambling problem. He was spending $5 a week, buying loot boxes in games online. He said he was just frequently doing this didn't think anything of it and think it was much money. Then one day he woke up to himself, and just went, oh my god, I'm actually gambling, I didn't realise that I was gambling. And I just stopped. And that is it all but I've noticed that my friends are doing the same thing. Because he'd already had the experience of being able to stop it, he was able to say I was doing that too and I kind of realized it's not right. And sort of show that he'd been able to get out of that cycle as well. So, again, I guess it comes down to like other positive role models as well.
8. When a young person turns 18. A whole new world of online and in person gambling opens up to them and it's quite a shock for parents and carers who are unaware of the gambling options that are out there. Can you suggest strategies for parents and carers to support the young person to gamble responsibly or not at all.
I'm gonna say something quite controversial there, which is, it's not new, they've already been doing it. And so we kind of have this idea that the minute somebody turns 18, all of this stuff becomes available. It was already there it was already available, it's just it's become legal at this point. So, they might get things like targeted adverts and stuff because they're they're suddenly 18. But sadly, chances are they've already been exposed, way, way before their eighteenth birthday. And so, the best strategy is actually speaking to kids when they're quite young talking about all of these things that we've normalized and in terms of gambling, way, way before they hit their 18th birthday. I think this surprises people but gambling happens all the time with young people, it is exactly the same as alcohol, where we're sort of saying, you know it's not legal to drink until 18 so I kind of don't need to worry about it until then. But young people will experiment and if a young person is going to be experimenting with drugs or alcohol, chances are they're going to experiment gambling as well. So, unfortunately, already there. So we need to get in there early.
There are all sorts of different things like gambling ad blockers and blockers with video games and stuff like that, that do exist, but I would not encourage a parent to use those things, unless they have a very open communication with the young person in that young person has initiated that they want that. Because the moment you as an adult, tell a child not to do something, it becomes a very very appealing. And also I can guarantee that young person is 100% more tech savvy than you, and they will work out a way to get around it anyway. Um, so, not the best the best stuff.
And so again, it just goes back to that having open communication, so I would probably say, if you've got young people who are on that 17, turning 18 cusp, it's probably a good time to, if you haven't already had all these conversations, sit down and go through all of the stuff that is going to suddenly be in their faces and see how they're actually going to deal with it.
Because we do have these kind of ideas in our society like when you turn 18, the thing to do is go and play a pokey machine, which seems absolutely crazy to me. But how do something that people think is fun at. And so, have have a conversation with them about all the other things that they could be doing as a young person, and so yeah it just comes down to open communication and making sure that they know that this stuff is going to happen so I guess the same way that as a parent or you would speak to them about drugs or alcohol or safe sex any of those kind of things. Just, unfortunately, you need to add gambling into those conversations as well.
EPIC: and arm yourself with the information, do a little bit of research before you open the conversation.
9. Gambling has devastating effects on anybody including financial and legal and an emotional and physical. What do you see is the most common concerning aspect of gambling on young people?
I had to have a really really good think about this. So everything else is about oh yeah there's so much information and this question I kind of went oh which one of these things is worse I'm really not sure, because at any age there can be really devastating effects so worst case scenarios you can have a young person gambling loosing huge amounts of money, you can find them getting into criminal activities, absolutely worst case scenarios, all sorts of emotional problems, pressure and all those kind of things. And suicide is a really common factor in gambling as well.
And I was thinking, which one of those things is really worse. And then I kind of thought actually the thing that's worse is not necessarily all those things, but with a young person, if they go from gambling into what we call problem gambling. So problem gambling is basically when you pretty much don't know when to stop, is what I would say when we're problem gambling starts. So you're kind of chasing this high all of the time. And you start believing that you're just going to win big. So you're losing time or money. And if that is happening to a young person, there are plenty of situations in which they can get really into the cycle of addiction and it can last for years and years and years.
So we do know that the biggest gamblers are young men, 18 - 25 year olds, we know that they gamble a lot, but we don't generally see people until they're in their 30s. So, it can be a long time until somebody actually seeks out help. And so if they fall into that cycle and say, somebody is say 21 when they develop a gambling problem, but they don't seek help, until they're 31, they've lost their youth. And, and that is something you cannot get back whatsoever, because they were just addicted to gambling.
EPIC: That's very powerful that really for me comes back to the if you can see someone's got an issue the R U OK messages the main thing. Thank you.
10. Over to you. Is there anything that I've missed or some wisdom that you can offer our listeners relating to gambling with young people.
One of the best messages we can take away from this, because we’ve been talking about the worst end of this. The good news with young people is most young people manage to get themselves out of the gambling cycle, particularly with young men. A lot of the reason that they get into gambling is just because they're at that kind of risk taking, stage, and the testosterone and combination of peer pressure and all those different things. As they mature, sometimes they kind of, like I was saying about that 15 year old the other day, sometimes they just kind of wake up to themselves, and they kind of grow up a bit and realize that maybe that's not a great thing to be doing.
And, also we do see that if young people have a lot of support like good support systems around them as well, that really really helps. So just because young person is gambling, doesn't mean that they're going to get a full on gambling addiction. Because I think we've said to scare parents and carers. So, if you're open to having conversations with them you. You see them maturing their friends are supportive. They've got other interest in their life there's a good chance that they will get out of that gambling cycle.
11. Thank you for saying something so positive. Yeah, It's a really good spot to to finish on.
EPIC: I urge people to look at the Gamble Aware website, there's just so much information on it I urge everyone to visit the gamble away website where you can find out this information for parents and carers families.
12. How can people get in touch with Gamble Aware?
Good question. So they can go via the website, which has a heap of resources like you said, it does also have a lot of self help self help resources if people aren't ready to speak to somebody, so they can go through there, or they can call gamble or helpline, which is 1-800-858-8858.
And so although I work for a Gamble Aware in Sydney northern region, there is a Gamble Aware counselling service in every section of New South Wales. If you call that helpline, they will put you in touch with the service in your area.
Contact Gamble Aware via their website - https://www.gambleaware.nsw.gov.au/
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