JUDGING BY LETTERS to the editor and furious Internet circulation, the New York Times struck a collective nerve the other week with its front-page story announcing that "Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood." According to the article, surveys of 138 female students at Yale revealed that roughly 60 percent planned to cut back or stop work when they had children. Scattered interviews at other high-end schools confirmed that many of today's young women do not dream of supercharged 12-hour days at the future office, at least not when their children are young. And though hardly scientific, the Times report did track with similar recent soundings on other campuses, as well as with the statistical fact that well-educated women with youngsters in the house are indeed now slightly more likely to be at home than were women in the same group a decade earlier.

What accounts for this gradual but real shift in what many of today's privileged young women seem to want? Interestingly enough, one factor appears to be personal experience. "I've seen the difference between kids who did have their mother stay at home and kids who didn't, and it's kind of like an obvious difference when you look at it," one explains. "I see a lot of women in their 30s who have full-time nannies, and I just question if their kids are getting the best," says another. To the exasperation of the older generation of feminists now shepherding them through elite institutions, at least some of these young women have grown up in the very world their progressive fore-mothers dreamed of--and reject it precisely because they know it.

Just as interesting, this demurral based on experience is part of a much larger story now being written by today's adolescents and young adults. A funny thing happened to the kids raised on Sesame Street and all the other fare touting politically correct notions of the family: They grew up--and as they did, a significant number looked at their own lives and found progressive happy-talk about the family coming up short.