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It’s one of those markers on the winding road to adulthood: the first visit home after having gone off to college.

Whether it’s over holiday break or just a long weekend, that return can be fun, it can be awkward, it can be ugly. Sometimes you hit the trifecta.

Mom and Dad might see their child coming home, back to the bosom of the family, back to where he or she grew up. The college student — Child? Who’s a child? — might just as easily view it as swinging by his or her parents’ place for a quick stopover on the way to a party with old high school friends.

“This is something I speak with my students about all the time,” says Thierry Guedj, a psychology professor at Boston University, who teaches courses touching on topics such as separation from parents and developing as an individual. “A lot of them have expressed ambivalence about what it means to leave home, and who are you, and do your parents still know you, and are you the same person or are you a different person.”

Parents would be wise, Guedj says, to discuss things with their child before that first visit. Laying some groundwork will pay off.

John and Patty Schertzer’s 18-year-old daughter, Corinne, is a freshman at the University of Missouri. When she was in high school in St. Louis, John says, the main house rule was about curfew. Now that she is a young adult, old ground rules are still in place but will be tweaked.

“Probably the biggest thing will be an adjustment of the curfew. That’s really more of ‘Let me know what time you’re going to be in’ versus, you know, ‘You gotta be in by midnight,’” John Schertzer says/

That loosening of the grip and the evolution of the relationship from adult-to-kid to adult-to-adult are part of a young person’s maturation process. Guedj says that process should start in high school. They learn to drive and manage their finances; it’s also time for them to start figuring out who they are.

“The more preparation you do ahead of time in terms of helping your kids grow into adults, the better off you’ll be when they come home,” he says.

Well before their son Nolan went off to Texas A&M University last year, Lana and David Gajeski of Katy, Texas, had rules they expected him to follow.

“We listed rules, he understood they were listed and he respected that,” Lana says. “And he maintained his maturity and responsibility.”

This year Nolan’s a sophomore, and they’ve shifted the burden of budgeting his finances to him. All the money he should need is in a checking account, and it’s his responsibility to handle it smartly.

Curfew and other rules seem to be familiar flash points. But that’s just a manifestation of something deeper, Guedj says. Away at college, young adults are developing their own ideas, tastes and values. Some parents have a hard time with that.

“A lot of time it’s just parents clamping down with rules of behavior or curfews and things like that,” he says, “but I think the deeper thing is their kids are now people who have their own sets of opinions and their own sets of beliefs, and a lot of parents can be threatened by that.”

Coming down too hard can have undesirable consequences. Parents who tightly control their kids might find them not wanting to come home and lose their freedom. Guedj suggests that parents stay flexible. Sometimes they need to tighten the leash. Sometimes they need to loosen it. Sometimes they need to drop it altogether. Things are fluid.

— William Hageman, Chicago Tribune

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