High Stakes

Teens Gambling With Their Futures

By Laura Paul

She started gambling when she was 7. Her parents, both alcoholics, thought it was cute to have a child playing poker games with the adults. Karen H., who doesn't use her full last name as a rule of anonymity through Gamblers Anonymous, has not gambled for more than 24 years. She is the executive secretary for Gamblers Anonymous International Service Office in Los Angeles, Calif.

Even though legal gambling is restricted to those over 18 years of age, an increasing number of teenagers borrow money, neglect themselves, miss class, pawn items and lie to hide their gambling addictions – and the Internet makes it easy.

"I gambled as a teenager," Karen says. "I learned how to shoot dice, and I shot dice with the boys in the co-ed locker room at my junior high school. It was just the excitement. I took money out of my mom's purse to gamble."

Her gambling also manifested itself in seemingly less harmful ways. "[I] used to throw baseball cards up against a garage door with friends, and whoever got closest to the garage door got the baseball cards," she says.

Karen even got married in Las Vegas. She agreed to join Gamblers Anonymous as a way to pacify her husband, thinking she would quit gambling for a while and then go back to it. "My marriage was on the verge of disaster, but I did not care about anybody," she says.

She quit gambling when her children were 9 and 13. "I would be gone for a day – maybe two days – when the clubs started staying open all night, and I would do things I'm not real proud of like leave my 7-year-old," she says. "I'd drop her off at school and say, 'Now you wait here on the street corner for me. I'll be here to get you. You have a dentist appointment,' and I'd never show up to get her. Same thing with my son. They would be waiting for me on the porch when I got home. Sometimes it was raining. Sometimes I did not get home."

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• Talk about it!