I think that's more because people don't want to teach children about sex, while people do demonstrate what gambling is early on. Ones much more complex and if you're letting a kid find their own answers unguided, that can potentially be disasterous.
That's not even mentioning theneffect of instilling shame on your own biological body and treating parts of it as taboo. If parents refuse to talk about something, it can be taken as either a bad thing, a scary thing, or a complicated thing.
Come on now. It's hard to find anything more immediately exciting and alluring than sex, especially for teenagers. The biological imperatives and inclinations are too strong regarding sex for virtually everyone, compared to anything related to gambling. And OP is absolutely right that the barrier to entry is a great deterrent in the case of gambling, as well. Just based on that alone, easy-access, sex-related stuff is always going to have a potentially greater effect on almost anyone, regardless of their previous knowledge about it or warnings received by other people during their childhood.
>people do demonstrate what gambling is early on
Talk about going out on a limb. What are you basing this affirmation on? I don't see any parents lending any word of advice to their children about gambling-like activities, in any case, as most of them indulge in those themselves, let alone their own kids.
And? More reason to educate them early. Similar to why we have a strong desire while young to devour sweets. Now imagine we ignore diet and leave a kid to eat whatever they feel like.
>compared to anything related to gambling.
My theme is education and awareness, not playing a one up contest on what is worse. Could we both agree that these are factors to teach to kids early?
>What are you basing this affirmation on?
My upbringing and education? You think 3rd/4th graders learning about "number cubes" won't equate that to gambling? They also love talking about card games later on. Parent taught me plenty of common games as well, alongside Dominoes. And ofc Z the media. Kids have eyes and can see adults gamble. They don't need a deep dive into a dedicated class to learn the deal (but yes, I was taught that gambling is bad).
You're not trying to sway people away from internet porn, you're telling people how sex actually works in reality. My teachers taught about the basic biology of genetalia (especially wrt sexual function), how to perform safe sex, STD's, Pregnancy, and school resources (we had condoms at the nurses office, for example).
I feel those are the basics needs everyone should he taught. A decent teacher would also have an open Q&A about sex and help in dispelling any potentially bad notions learned from elsewhere. The best lessons come from.those who seek knowledge themselves.
It's not perfect. I wish my education also taught more about genetalia care (there's still so so much misinformation about foreskin) and dove more into what consent actually is (that was more in college). But the point was to counter balance whatever people was seeing on the internet, not necessarily demonize it. Just like how understanding how to calculate probability can change your approach to gambling, learning more about your body and other humans' behavior can change your approach to how you interpret porn online. Even if people continue to consume it after being educated.
I think it's hard to form a gambling addiction if you don't really have any money for gambling. You learn pretty fast that you get better value trading than gambling. I don't see how its much worse than baseball cards (we also had "top trumps" and pokemon cards and such).
Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff like loot boxes.
I think the real victims of gambling in games are usually adults who have a much greater ability to dump their life's savings into a game.