Your child has impulse control issues or can’t get enough of swapping trading cards on the playground. Could it be a sign of a future addiction?
In our accelerated culture, we see increasingly younger children facing very adult problems. The latest vice to become an issue for kids is gambling addiction. Of course, you don’t see the under 12 set hanging out in Vegas on the weekends, but there are plenty of options for kids to get a gambling fix. Lottery tickets, football pools and trading cards are just a few possibilities. Online gambling is another way or even using non-gambling games to place wagers with friends.
How do you know if your kid’s at risk of gambling addiction?
A Canadian study that followed kids from kindergarten to sixth grade found that the biggest factor that indicated a risk for future gambling addiction is impulsivity. The Canadian study found that kids who were inattentive, impulsive and hyperactive in kindergarten, were more likely to develop symptoms of risky gambling behavior by the time they reach middle school.
“There is something that connects both the impulsivity and the gambling,” says the study’s main author, Dr. Linda S. Pagani, a professor at Sainte-Justine University Hospital Research Center and the University of Montreal. To come up with this conclusion, Pagani and her colleagues surveyed more than 160 kindergarten children, and asked their teachers to fill in questionnaires at the beginning of the school year where they had to rank the students’ inattentiveness, distractibility and hyperactivity on a scale of 1 to 9. Six years later, when the kids were in the 6th grade, the researchers asked them in telephone interviews how often they took part in gambling-related activities, such as playing cards or bingo for money, buying lottery tickets, playing video games or video poker for money, or placing bets on sport events or with friends.
The experts found that for an increase of each unit on the impulsivity scale in kindergarten, there was a 25 percent higher risk in gambling activity by the sixth grade.
(Note: None of the children in the study had a diagnosed learning problem such as ADHD. They were all typically developing kids.)
How to avoid problem gambling
According to the pros, nearly 15 percent of all kids have problems with impulsiveness, particularly boys. But if you are a parent of one of these kids, a future gambling problem is not a forgone conclusion. The experts suggest that the best way to avoid future problems is to improve their attention at an early age. Detecting which kids are headed for trouble early gives you a better chance at fixing a problem before it starts. Young children can learn to focus and concentrate through something Pagani calls “effortful control,” adding “if we can improve their attention by one unit, then we can improve their outcomes by 25 percent.”
Tags: Child Gambling, Dr. Linda Pagani, Gambling Addiction, Impulsiveness, Lottery, Lottery Tickets, Pagani, Trading Cards, University of Montreal
