When ‘Delay Use’ Isn’t Enough: Rethinking Prevention in the Age of: Gambling, Alcohol & Other Drugs, Porn, and Social Media (GAPS)
By Katie Greeley, (she/her), LCSW, CADC
November 17th, 2025
The adolescent risk landscape has changed, and educators are on the front lines.
Forty years ago, we focused on external risks: binge drinking, wearing seat belts, smoking, teen pregnancy, and drinking and driving. A student got caught with cigarettes in their backpack. A counselor heard from a classmate who was worried about a friend’s drinking. These were the red flags educators were trained to spot, and they had systems to address them. We had a clear framework for how alcohol and other drugs affected the developing brain and increased vulnerability to addiction.
Where risk was once visible and physical, it’s now hidden and digital, but it still taps into the brain’s reward system, driving patterns of escape, isolation, coping, and compulsion.
Key areas of concern include problematic social media use, online gambling often in the form of sports betting, and early frequent exposure to pornography.
Risk is no longer just about access. It’s about exposure: relentless, round-the-clock, and often invisible, with progression that can outpace what we typically see from repeated substance use leading to substance use disorders.
When we look closely at what today’s students are up against, we see:
Online gambling is rising. Between 5% and 15% of adolescents worldwide gamble online each year, often without fully grasping the risks.
Drug use looks different, and more dangerous. Even as alcohol and other drug use hits historic lows among adolescents, fatal overdoses are at record highs, driven by counterfeit pills containing fentanyl, often purchased through apps like Snapchat or encrypted chat apps like Telegram, and Signal.
Pornography exposure is starting earlier. Most kids first encounter porn between ages 9 and 13. By 18, 93% of boys and 62% of girls report having seen it online.
Social media isn’t just a risk on its own, it accelerates risk across the board. It’s no longer just a place to doom-scroll or compare your inner world to everyone’s highlight reel. Adolescents are exposed to porn, targeted by sports betting ads, and can buy drugs with a few taps. X (formerly Twitter) is now a more common first source of porn than adult sites. Snapchat and Telegram make buying weed effortless. Gambling ads featuring star athletes and influencers reach students long before they understand the odds.
These aren’t just concerning behaviors. They are reshaping how adolescents manage impulses, cope with stress, and form real-world connections.
Prevention Ed remains rooted in substance use prevention, while recognizing that prevention today is more nuanced than ever. ‘Delay use’ isn’t enough on its own. Risks are interconnected, and so are the solutions.
The good news is we don’t need to rebuild prevention from scratch. We already have proven tools for opening conversations, building trust, and supporting healthier choices. Our work now is to adapt those tools to help students, families, and schools navigate today’s challenges together.
Understanding the full picture comes first.
GAPS is Prevention Ed’s framework for identifying the key domains of adolescent risk and making sense of how they are connected, how they escalate, and how we prevent and intervene.
Introducing the GAPS Framework
The Gambling, Alcohol and Other Drugs, Porn, Social Media (GAPS) may seem unrelated at first. Each shows up differently, impacts students in unique ways, and carries its own social and developmental risks.
But they share one critical feature: all four engage the same part of the adolescent brain, the reward system.
The rush of a bet. The escape of a high. The stimulation of explicit content. The pull of an endless scroll. Each of these activates dopamine, the brain’s chemical messenger for pleasure and motivation. In a developing brain, repeated exposure to these highs can reinforce unhealthy coping patterns and make it harder for adolescents to experience satisfaction from everyday life, manage stress, or connect with others.
Not every student who scrolls or drinks is on a path to addiction. Still, when these behaviors begin to cluster, escalate, or serve as a student’s primary coping strategy, they warrant close attention. GAPS offers educators a clear framework to recognize these overlapping risks and respond with strategies that are integrated, developmentally appropriate, and grounded in adolescent brain science.
Each domain of GAPS reflects distinct patterns of behavior. Understanding these patterns is just the beginning. For Prevention Ed, this marks the first step in a deeper effort to equip counselors with training, resources, and conversation to better identify risk, intervene early, and support student well-being.
Gambling & Sports Betting: The House Always Wins Powered By AI
Sports betting apps, loot boxes in games, and crypto speculation are introducing adolescents to gambling often without them realizing it. What starts as curiosity or entertainment can quickly become a risky pattern.
Neurological Impact: Gambling operates on random rewards. The unpredictability of a win, or even a near win, generates a powerful dopamine surge, reinforcing compulsive behavior and increasing the desire to keep playing.
What to look for: secretive device use, preoccupation with odds or games, borrowing money without explanation.
How schools can respond:
Teach how digital gambling systems work
Include gambling awareness in health and digital citizenship classes
Train counselors in behavioral addictions
Alcohol & Other Drugs: Familiar but Still Critical
Alcohol and cannabis remain easy for adolescents to access and often fly under the radar. Despite decades of prevention efforts, early use still disrupts brain development, mood regulation, and school performance.
Neurological Impact: These substances create predictable dopamine surges, offering reliable relief or escape. That consistency makes them powerful coping tools, especially for students dealing with stress or emotional pain.
What to look for: declining motivation, frequent illness, mood swings, or changes in friend groups.
How schools can respond:
Maintain clear, consistent alcohol and other drug use policies
Intervene early with support, not punishment
Offer confidential, youth-centered counseling
Pornography: Rewiring Intimacy Before It Develops
Most adolescents encounter pornography before they’ve had meaningful conversations about intimacy, boundaries, or consent. Early exposure can shape unrealistic expectations and reduce confidence in real-world relationships.
Neurological Impact: Pornography delivers dopamine spikes through visual novelty and instant stimulation. This trains the brain to seek out intense, often unrealistic experiences, weakening sensitivity to healthy, reciprocal connection.
How schools can respond:
Provide honest, age-appropriate discussions about online content and consent
Embed relationship education across the curriculum
Create shame-free, trauma-informed spaces for questions and dialogue
Social Media: Engineered to Keep Them Engaged
Social media dominates many adolescents’ waking hours. Platforms are built to keep users engaged, not necessarily connected, and what drives engagement often isn’t what supports well-being.
Neurological Impact: Social media taps into variable reinforcement. Dopamine is released not from each post, but from the anticipation that something exciting, validating, or emotionally charged might appear next — a digital slot machine effect.
What to look for: trouble focusing, emotional reactivity, sleep changes, or social withdrawal.
How schools can respond:
Teach digital literacy and emotional regulation
Encourage tech-free zones or mindfulness breaks
Promote balance and autonomy, not just restriction
GAPS and the Brain’s Reward System
Psychologists describe two main types of reinforcement:
Random rewards (seen in gambling, social media, and pornography) trigger powerful dopamine surges because outcomes are unpredictable. The brain becomes hooked on the possibility of reward, not just the reward itself.
Predictable rewards (like alcohol, nicotine, or cannabis) reinforce behavior through consistency. The brain learns, “this works every time,” making these substances go-to tools for relief, especially in the absence of healthier coping strategies.
Research shows that variable rewards are especially potent for forming habits. They wire motivation around anticipation and emotional highs, creating feedback loops that are hard to break. Predictable rewards, while less compulsive, can still produce deep behavioral grooves, particularly for adolescents using substances to manage anxiety, sadness, or social stress.
Whether random or predictable, these inputs all target the same reward circuitry — and all have the potential to reshape the developing brain.
That’s why the GAPS framework matters. When we stop treating these behaviors as isolated problems and start seeing the connections between them, we can take a more unified, brain-based approach to prevention, one that helps students build real, lasting tools for connection, regulation, and resilience.
What Schools Can Do
Schools are uniquely positioned to identify early patterns, shift norms, and strengthen protective factors. Prevention Ed supports schools to move beyond reactive responses and toward a proactive, integrated approach.
Here’s what we recommend:
Update advisory health curriculum to reflect today’s risk landscape, include behavioral addictions, digital wellness, and media literacy alongside traditional substance use education.
Bring in Quality Consultants. A trusted outside voice can spark engagement, validate school messaging, and help students hear critical information in a new way. Prevention Ed’s team brings professional credibility, cultural humility, and a student-centered approach to every session to address alcohol and other drug use, online gambling, and sports betting. Consider integrating these sessions into existing health classes, wellness weeks or advisory blocks.
Build a prevention culture grounded in curiosity, connection, and credibility — where students feel seen, supported, and informed, not judged, punished, or scared.
Educate parents about issues like sports betting, alcohol and other drugs, porn and social media.
Update school policies to reflect the reality of risk today. Clear, current, and compassionate policies are easier to enforce and easier for students to follow.
What Parents Can Do
Here’s what we recommend:
Talk early and often even if it feels awkward. Prepare what you’re going to say before starting the conversation, don’t try to wing it. Start conversations about alcohol, drugs, porn, gambling, and social media before they get the information somewhere else. Keep it honest, age-appropriate, and ongoing. You don’t have to cover everything at once. Work on creating a rhythm of open dialogue where your child knows they can come to you with questions or concerns.
Delay giving your child a smartphone. Over the past decade, we’ve learned a lot — and the data is clear: early access to smartphones is linked to increased anxiety, sleep disruption, and exposure to risky content. Every year you wait gives your child more time to build coping skills, social confidence, and healthy habits offline. That time helps lay a stronger foundation for healthier digital habits when they do go online.
Model the behaviors you want to see. Kids are paying attention from a very early age. Whether it’s how you use your phone, manage stress, or talk about alcohol and substance use, your example speaks louder than any rule you set. Be the model of balance, boundaries, and emotional regulation you hope your child will follow.
Stay curious, not critical. In 2025, the Venn diagram of online life and real life is a circle for your children. To them, what happens online feels just as real, emotional, and high-stakes as anything offline. Ask open-ended questions, be genuinely interested, and listen without judgment. Your calm curiosity builds trust and keeps communication open when it matters most.
No phones in the bedroom. It’s one of the simplest and most effective boundaries you can set. Keeping phones out of bedrooms protects sleep, reduces exposure to risky content, and creates a natural break from constant connectivity. For example, 90% of pornography consumption occurs via mobile devices. Experts agree: good sleep hygiene supports mental health, emotional regulation, and school performance, especially for adolescents. Charge devices overnight in a shared space, and model the habit yourself.
Final Thought
We can’t keep using yesterday’s prevention strategies for today’s risks. We owe students more than outdated lectures, one-off health lessons, or isolated addiction-recovery monologues. Integrating the GAPS framework into health classes and advisory, upskilling counseling teams to intervene early, or bringing in expert consultants reflects the new reality: prevention must be integrated, nuanced, and designed for the world students actually live in, because a developing brain doesn’t care whether risk is digital or physical. It reacts the same way.