For most of American history, gambling was something people had to go somewhere to do. Casinos, racetracks, lottery counters, and even illegal bookmakers created some kind of barrier between everyday life and placing a bet. Today, that barrier can be as small as opening an app.
That change is especially noticeable for younger people. Sports betting has become part of watching a game, prediction markets let people put money on everything from elections to sports, and social media is filled with screenshots of parlays, crypto trades, and stock options. Even video games have loot boxes and other features built around spending money for an uncertain reward. These things obviously are not all the same, but they increasingly exist in the same space, on the same phones, and sometimes with surprisingly similar experiences.
That is what makes this such an interesting policy problem. Our laws still draw fairly clear lines between gambling, investing, gaming, and prediction markets. For the people actually using them, those lines are becoming much harder to see.
It is easy to forget how quickly this happened. Until 2018, sports betting was effectively illegal across most of the United States. That year, the Supreme Court’s decision in Murphy v. NCAA struck down the federal law that had largely prevented states from legalizing it. In just a few years, sports betting went from something mostly associated with Las Vegas and illegal bookmakers to something advertised during games and accessible from a phone. According to the American Gaming Association, Americans legally wagered about $167 billion on sports in 2025, an 11 percent increase from the previous year.
For adults, that represented a huge change in access. For teenagers, it meant growing up in a completely different environment. A January 2026 national study from Common Sense Media found that 36 percent of boys between 11 and 17 had gambled within the previous year. By age 17, that number was nearly half. The social effect was even more striking: more than 8 in 10 boys whose friends gambled also gambled, compared with fewer than 2 in 10 boys whose friends did not.
Gambling has not just become easier to access. It has become much more normal. Someone watching a basketball game can see betting odds during the broadcast, scroll past a sportsbook advertisement, and hear friends discussing their parlays the next morning. But sports betting might actually be the easiest part for policymakers to deal with, because at least everyone agrees that it is gambling.
Prediction markets make things much more complicated.
In New York, someone has to be 21 to legally use a mobile sportsbook. Yet certain prediction markets allow users beginning at 18 to trade contracts based on future events, including sports. In July 2026, New York sued Kalshi, arguing that the company is effectively offering unlicensed gambling, while Kalshi argues that its contracts are financial products regulated under federal commodities law.
The result is strange: a 19 year old in New York can be too young to legally bet on the outcome of a game through a sportsbook, but old enough to put money on the outcome of that same game through a prediction market. In fact, recent data reported by MarketWatch estimates that users ages 18 to 20 have already wagered more than $5 billion on Kalshi.
Legally, there is an explanation for the distinction. From the perspective of the 19 year old pressing a button on a phone, it is much harder to explain.
The same issue appears with investing. Investing is obviously not the same as gambling. Buying shares in a company means owning part of an actual business, and long term investing is an important way people build wealth. But opening an investing app today does not necessarily mean buying an index fund and holding it for thirty years. Users can trade short term options, speculate on cryptocurrencies, and move money in and out of positions almost instantly.
The important question is not whether stocks are gambling. They are not. It is whether the experience of taking financial risks online is starting to converge even while the laws governing those risks remain completely separate.
Open an app, pick an outcome, put money behind it, watch what happens, and try again. That cycle can exist in very different forms across a sportsbook, prediction market, speculative trade, or even a video game. The economics may be different, but the person using the phone does not experience a regulatory category. They experience the product.
Schools are already seeing the effects. A 2025 survey from Next Gen Personal Finance found that 83 percent of more than 1,000 teachers surveyed had recently seen or heard about students gambling or betting on sports. Data from GoGuardian, reported by Chalkbeat, also shows that schools block roughly 140,000 attempts to access gambling, betting, and fantasy sports sites every month. The rate has increased by nearly 30 percent since the company began tracking it in 2022.
That feels like a major hole in what schools consider financial literacy.
Students learn about compound interest, credit scores, budgeting, and investing. Those things matter. But students should also understand why a sportsbook makes money, what expected value means, how an options contract differs from owning a stock, how prediction markets work, and how to recognize when taking financial risks has stopped being entertainment.
This does not mean schools should tell students that every risky financial decision is bad. The goal should actually be the opposite: students should be able to tell the difference between different kinds of risk. Financial literacy should reflect the financial world students actually live in, not the one that existed twenty years ago.
There is also a larger role for regulation. Digital platforms can track how often someone logs in, how much they spend, what they do after losing, and what makes them come back. Artificial intelligence will only make that personalization more precise. That creates an important question: If a platform can become extremely good at recognizing the behavior that keeps someone betting, shouldn’t regulators expect it to become equally good at recognizing the behavior that suggests someone should stop?
New York is already beginning to consider that question. In March 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul proposed protections that would prevent sports wagering companies from using AI to target bettors and would create activity triggers requiring companies to check on users displaying signs of possible gambling harm.
The debate over gambling used to be much simpler. Should casinos be legal? Should states have lotteries? Should sports betting be allowed? Those questions still matter, but they do not fully describe the world younger people are entering anymore.
A teenager can move from a video game to a prediction market to a trading app without ever leaving the same screen, while each activity may be governed by a completely different regulator, age requirement, or definition of gambling.
Public policy has spent decades deciding where to draw the line around gambling. Technology keeps finding new ways to blur it.
A generation ago, keeping a teenager away from gambling could at least partly mean keeping them out of a casino. Today, the harder question is what happens when the casino no longer looks like one.
Sources
Common Sense Media. Betting on Boys: Understanding Gambling Among Adolescent Boys. January 29, 2026.
American Gaming Association. Commercial Gaming Revenue Hits $78.7 Billion in 2025, Driving Record $18.1 Billion in Gaming Taxes Nationwide. 2026.
Supreme Court of the United States. Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association. May 14, 2018.
Next Gen Personal Finance. NGPF Flash Survey: 83% of Teachers Report Students Gambling on Sports. April 2, 2026.
Chalkbeat. Lily Altavena, As More Teen Boys Turn to Sports Betting, Financial Literacy Teachers Rush to Show Gambling’s Real Odds. July 29, 2026.
Office of the New York Attorney General. Governor Hochul and Attorney General James Announce New York Has Sued Kalshi for Running Illegal Gambling Operation. July 31, 2026.
Office of Governor Kathy Hochul. Keeping New Yorkers Safe: Governor Hochul Previews Measures to Keep Youth From Sports Wagering and Protect New Yorkers From Gambling Harms. March 30, 2026.
MarketWatch. People Under 21 Can’t Use Most Sportsbooks, So They’ve Wagered Over $5 Billion on Kalshi Instead. September 2026.
Choices Over Consequences 
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