Being poor spreads your kids' legs

[essentialsaltes]

TIME magazine has a little section with infobits about the different income segments of the US. The different income tiers are:

Households earning $200K+ ("The 5%")
$100K-$199K (The 17%)
$60K-$99K (The 22%)
$30K-$59K (The 26%)
<$30K (The 30%)

So there's little factoids like the percent of each group that smokes:

12% (<-- I assume the bump is for big fat Cuban cigars lit by flaming $100 bills.)
10%
15%
20%
28%

But I was most struck by the data about the children of these different households.
Average SAT scores of the kids of those households

1151
1094
1036
987
897

(Before you go all Social Darwinist on this, the 5% can afford pretty good tutors. I remember when I was trying to finally weed off that last client. I couldn't raise my prices enough to make them stop calling me.)

Perhaps the more surprising one was Percent of their children who have had sex by age 16.

32%
41%
46%
54%
61%

Comments

[karteblanche.livejournal.com]

I think the difference in rates of children having sex may be at least partially explained by the difference in unsupervised time. Children in lower income families have more unsupervised time: parents are working and often these kids just come home after school. Families with higher income are more likely to have a stay-at-home parent and are more likely to have their kids enrolled in after-school programs, sports, clubs, etc.

[kyrialyse.livejournal.com]

Yes, but my 22%er cats are smarter than those spoiled 17 and 5%er ones.