Guidance

The Responsible Gambling Strategy Board’s advice on the National Strategy to Reduce Gambling Harms 2019–2022

Published
1 February 2019

Last updated
21 December 2022 - Changes

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Contents
Part 3 - Prevention
Families and others affected by someone else’s gambling

Families and others affected by someone else’s gambling

The partners of people who gamble harmfully, their children, their wider family and friends and other social contacts, can also be harmed. There can be multiple knock-on effects, including reduced household budgets, less visible negative effects on personal relationships and, at the extreme, families dealing with the consequences of suicide. Some work has been done to address these harms in the recent past.³¹ The objective for the new strategy should be to consolidate and systematise the work, build awareness and broaden the resources and interventions available in family settings and beyond.

Causation is not always linear in nature, and direct impacts are rarely clear-cut. Gambling behaviours modelled in families and peer groups affect the gambling behaviour of others. In particular, parents have more influence than they might realise on affecting their children’s behaviour.³² Their actions can either increase the risk of harmful gambling by their children or play a protective role.³³

An effective harm-prevention strategy needs to recognise these complex relationships and help families and peer groups play a more protective role and avoid transmitting risk to younger generations. Support and awareness raising could help them play a protective role more effectively. We suggested in a previous advice paper on children, young people and gambling³⁴ that this should include helping parents to know what their children are doing online – especially if this involves gambling with ‘skins’ or ‘gambling-like activities’ which may have the effect of normalising gambling for children.³⁵ Recent moves by the Gambling Commission and regulators in other countries to address these new challenges have been a positive development.³⁶