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Today's question comes for Victoria in Texas. My 14-year-old son wants to allocate some of his earned money to online gambling.

He says, everyone, and this is't all caps, at school does it.

Please help me explain to him why it is 100% wrong.

I, yai, yai. How old is your son?

Your youngest?

My youngest is 17.

I got a 17 and a 19.

So I will answer it as if they came to me and said, dad, everyone is doing it. First, I'd start with, I can't help but hear my nanny's voice right now. He used to say to us, if everyone's jumping off of a bridge, would you do it too? You know, that's just old school, you know, and I'd start with that. Then I would say, all right, let's look at gambling. And I actually would come to it with numbers. I'm a little bit of a data geek. And so I would

actually go pull real numbers on this particular type of online game. Let's say it's sports.

Okay. And I would show the rates of success on this and let the numbers talk for you to some

degree.

Second, I would explain gambling as a whole and how it does not pay off.

And I would say just because they live in your house,

if they're going to do something that you are philosophically or spiritually, whatever you want to say

opposed to, what I would tell them, my son is if you're going to do that and you're going to

go around me and not honor the advice I'm giving you and do something so stupid, then you are

not going to receive these

blessings for me. Now, that may be too harsh. Dave, you may disagree with that, but I would take a

pretty strong stance after I've made the numbers case and make it very clear. I don't believe in this.

I think this is foolish, and this is against the values of my home, and therefore there

are going to be consequences if you do this. And then they've got to learn the hard way.

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