Parents’ vs friends’ influence on teenagers’ deception about gambling

This paper investigates the association between teenagers’ concealment of gambling activities from parents and the gambling habits of parents and friends. We use survey data from 10,959 Italian high-school students aged 13–18 or older, focusing on those who reported having actively gambled (N = 5542). We find that teenagers with gambling parents are 17–18% less likely to conceal their gambling activities compared to those with non-gambling parents. Instead, having gambling friends does not statistically influence teenagers’ deception. We further show that deception decreases in the presence of a good parent-child relationship, and when the money used for gambling comes from parents. Together, these empirical patterns highlight the dominant role of parents over friends, and lend support for intergenerational transmission of gambling behaviors within the household through implicitly reducing the cost of gambling concealment for adolescents. We suggest family-based policy interventions, and call for replication and further evidence.