There is a casino in your child’s pocket, and it’s time to talk about it

When you first become a parent, it’s astonishing how quickly you realise how many decisions you take for granted, and how much of your time you’ll have to spend explaining these things to kids so that they either don’t make the same mistakes, or don’t get themselves into trouble.

It starts with things like not touching hot stoves and waiting for the symbol to go green before crossing the road. But before too long those conversations take on a more serious tone as they move towards young adulthood – how to be safe online, drink responsibly, have healthy relationships, and why speeding behind the wheel of a car is never OK.

This week, though, it really hit home to me that there’s another conversation parents need to be having urgently with their children, and in particular their sons.

By now, most of us know that Australians lose more each year to gambling than any other country. But what many people don’t realise is how steep the rise in the amounts we’re losing, as well as the number of people gambling, has climbed in a relatively short period of time.

In the 12 months between March 2025 and March of this year, we lost $36 billion to gambling. That’s $1.3 billion more than the 12-month period prior, and $15.3 billion more than we lost in 2020.

Back then, around half of Australians said they’d had a punt at least once over the course of the year. By 2024, that figure jumped to two in every three people. While there’s nothing inherently dangerous with placing a wager occasionally, this rise does speak to just how normalised gambling has become in our culture.

We should be doing everything we possibly can to avoid putting boys more at risk, but that’s not what’s happening.

One of the main culprits for this unprecedented growth is online gambling, which has made gambling quicker, easier, and more accessible. As one expert so aptly put it, online gambling has put a casino in every person’s pocket. Where only 8 per cent of people had bet online in 2017, by 2024 one third of us had.

But if the legal age of gambling is 18, why do parents need to be having conversations with their children years before then? Well, there are a number of reasons.

When it comes to gambling broadly, the Australian Gambling Research Centre found that around 3 million people (15 per cent of all gamblers) engage in high-risk wagering and experience gambling-related harm. This can include things like stress, anxiety or depression, borrowing or stealing money or even skipping meals, all to feed a gambling habit.

Men specifically are twice as likely to engage in both low-risk and high-risk gambling, likely to gamble higher amounts of money, likely to lose more money, and more likely to engage in riskier forms of gambling.

Across 10 kinds of gambling, men outparticipated women in eight categories, with only lotteries and scratch tickets more popular among women. Men, meanwhile, were almost five times more likely to bet on horse or dog racing, and more than eight times more likely to bet on sports than women.

At the same time, people aged between 18 and 24 who gamble regularly are twice as susceptible to high-risk gambling than any other age group.

Perhaps most troubling, though, is the fact that today, the most common gambler in Australia is a male aged between 18 and 34. If his actions move away from being the occasional punt to harmful gambling, he becomes more likely to experience poor mental health and become four times more likely to have suicidal thoughts, and if he has a partner, they become almost three times more likely to experience domestic violence.

Considering men are already three times more likely than women to die by suicide, we should be doing everything we possibly can to avoid putting boys more at risk, but that’s not what’s happening.

The prevalence of betting ads on TV, radio, podcasts and social media means that kids today are not only fully aware of what gambling is, but also who the major betting agencies are, far too early in life. This repeated exposure over years has, as we’ve seen, normalised gambling and made it seem highly alluring to a younger audience.

We know that because according to the Australia Institute, 600,000 teenagers under the age of 18 are betting every year, either through working out how to circumvent age verifications on online gambling sites or with the help of their parents.

And as we’ve heard time and again, if a young man does find himself unlucky enough to develop a harmful relationship with gambling, trying to stop isn’t easy – and for some reason, it’s perfectly legal for betting agencies to prey on this.

Earlier this week, former football player turned influencer Luke Bateman told a Senate inquiry that when he was in his early 20s he would steal money from his mum, his siblings and his partner so that he could redeem $1000 for free bonus bets being offered to him by gambling companies.

These bonus bets, he said, were “direct offers customised for me that basically said if you deposit $1000, we will give you $1000 in bonus bets” and were offered to him on days of the week that correlated with major sporting matches.

Bateman also said these offers, which are known as inducements, “destroyed my life because that’s what kept you coming back … when you wanted to get out.”

Earlier this year, the coroner’s court of Victoria heard that on the day Kyle Hudson took his own life in 2021, he placed two online bets worth over $6000. Within hours of losing on both bets, the 22-year-old Googled methods of suicide, and later that evening he was discovered by his mother.

In the four short years that Hudson was able to legally gamble, he deposited more than $400,000 into gambling companies. Kyle’s older brother, Ryan, put it best when he asked “How can we accept this as a society?” As much as government legislation to reduce exposure to gambling ads and create stronger safeguards is needed, parents need to take an active role too.

Because just like our modelling of things like drinking, swearing and showing respect are observed by our children, research shows that by far, the strongest factor in a child developing a gambling problem is the behaviour their parents model.

As a parent of a son, these risks terrify me. They should terrify every parent. But instead of them scaring us away, they should scare us into having tough conversations, so we don’t have to see the ones we love lose.

Gambler’s Help: 1800 858 858. Lifeline: 13 11 14.

Victoria Devine is an award-winning retired financial adviser, a bestselling author and host of Australia’s No.1 finance podcast, She’s on the Money. She is also founder and director of Zella Money.

• Advice given in this article is general in nature and is not intended to influence readers’ decisions about investing or financial products. They should always seek their own professional advice that takes into account their personal circumstances before making any financial decisions.

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