Alyson Smith
MA, CPC
Operations Director
A generation ago, placing a bet on a game meant driving to a casino or finding a bookie. Today it means unlocking a phone. Since federal restrictions on sports betting were lifted in 2018, the market has grown from under $5 billion wagered annually to roughly $150 billion last year. Furthermore, 90% of those bets are now placed on phones, often live, while a game is still being played. Betting apps aren’t a niche hobby anymore; they’re woven into sports media, social feeds, and peer culture. The research is increasingly clear that young adults are the group most exposed to harm.
A landmark decade-long MRI study by the National Institute of Mental Health and UCLA, tracking brain development from ages 4 to 21, found that “higher-order” regions like the prefrontal cortex — the seat of planning, judgment, and impulse control — are among the last parts of the brain to mature, continuing to develop well into young adulthood. That’s part of why the Massachusetts Department of Public Health points to research showing that children introduced to betting by age 12 are up to four times more likely to develop a gambling problem later in life. It’s the same reason a 19-year-old placing an in-game bet is taking on more risk than the activity itself might suggest because the parts of the brain that would normally say “not tonight” are still coming online.
Recent national survey data backs this up. A 2026 national survey conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of the National Council on Problem Gambling found that nearly two-thirds of adults over 21 report having gambled in some form before turning 21, and a third of 21-to-44-year-olds say they placed a sports bet before they were legally allowed to. Early exposure is becoming more common and it’s a known risk factor for harder-to-shake patterns down the road.
One of the more striking findings from recent research is how many young bettors believe they’re actually good at it. The 2025 American Sports Fanship Survey, conducted by the Siena College Research Institute and St. Bonaventure University, found that 80% of online sports bettors believed they could make money betting on sports. Believing you have an edge changes how a bet feels: it stops registering as a gamble and starts feeling like a skill, or worse, a plan.
This overconfidence pairs with a second pattern researchers keep finding. Many young adults describe betting as a low-stakes, everyday choice, comparable to buying a coffee or going out to lunch, rather than a form of gambling with real downside. That framing makes it easier to place the next bet without pausing to notice a pattern forming.
Sports betting rarely shows up as a standalone behavior. A 2025 study published in Addictive Behaviors followed 210 young adult bettors, ages 18 to 29, over a full year of biweekly surveys and found that upticks in alcohol use tracked closely with more frequent betting, larger amounts wagered, and behaviors like chasing losses. It’s less a single-issue habit than a thread that pulls on others alongside it.
There’s also a social layer. A qualitative study of 50 young Australian men who bet on sports, published in Addiction Research & Theory, found that betting had become embedded in peer sporting rituals and friend-group identity, with some participants describing social pressure to gamble in order to fit in. That social embeddedness is part of what makes it hard to just “stop” once betting starts causing problems; walking away from the bet can feel like walking away from the group.
Perhaps the most important shift is how fast the loop has gotten. Live, in-game betting means a young adult can place a wager, see the outcome, feel the win or loss, and place another bet within minutes, dozens of times over the course of a single game. Combined with how normalized betting has become within sports fandom itself, that speed makes it harder for young people to notice when a fun habit has become a costly one, and harder still to ask for help.
None of this means every young adult who places a bet is headed for crisis. But the research points to a few things families and coaches can act on now:
At LifeTutors, this is the kind of pattern we help young adults and families notice and name — not from a place of fear, but with the tools to build a life that reflects what actually matters to them, one clear-eyed choice at a time.
Sources
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