MANY a parent has just delivered their offspring to university this past weekend and come home to… what? A nest that is half empty or half full?

Are you missing them already or heaving a sigh of relief? For the vast majority, it’s the former. It’s so weird when your children suddenly reach this stage of semi-adulthood when only a minute ago they were small beings completely dependent on you for their very existence. Taking them to a place away from home and leaving them there to fend for themselves actually feels like abandonment.

You suspect that the minute you drive away they just burst into tears, like babies at nursery or toddlers at pre-school.

The reality, of course, is that it’s their parents who are crying. My sister, whose son, the youngest of three, has just started university, has spent the past two weeks sobbing, mostly out of his sight except when he unexpectedly caught her once, even though he has been deliriously excited about it and couldn’t wait to go. For him and for her, it’s the start of a new life, the only difference being his is a new life he wants and hers isn’t.

Upstairs at her house is a series of gradually emptying bedrooms, with just one of the children’s bedrooms occupied by her middle son a couple of nights a week as he spends most of his time at his girlfriend’s.

My sister is certainly suffering from a mostly empty nest and will need a lot of time to get used to it. Totally unlike another parent I’ve been hearing about recently. Her son, her one remaining child at home, starts university next weekend and she is more concerned about keeping her new husband happy than her youngest leaving home.

She has arranged for them to drive him to his new accommodation halfway up the country, drop him off at the door and drive off immediately because she’ll have other things to do. “You mean you don’t want to spend any time with me on my first day…?” “No,” came the flat reply.

As she rarely speaks to him, I suspect he will find it a blessed relief to be away from such a cold mother and a new stepfather he loathes, but how awful for him to leave knowing he’s not wanted and won’t be missed.

Another parent I know is worried her child will get depressed because he’s had a difficult summer and another is terrified about her daughter’s safety. Not surprising really, when you read stories such as last week’s Argus revelation that student welcome bags at freshers’ week at Sussex University contained an advert from a toothpaste company showing a woman dribbling toothpaste out of her mouth in an obviously sexual way and the words “spit” and “swallow” on the back.

Not only is it embarrassingly crass, what a horrific way to welcome 18-year-old girls to a place where they are away from home for the first time and sharing accommodation with 18-year-old boys.

The ad was obviously intended to ensure that the toothbrush company was “dahn wiv va kidz” but it backfired horribly when the complaints started pouring in. Good, because they deserve it for their ugly message that female student are not only sexually available but also up for anything. Shame on them.

No wonder parents worry about their teenage daughters’ safety. However, what we parents have to keep in mind is that the vast majority of students survive university. For some, it’s a bad experience, suffering mental illness and stress, but most emerge as fully fledged adults with friends for life, fabulous memories, new skills and a decent qualification to wave in front of potential employers.

What they most need is parental support, whether the pastoral care services at their university are excellent or poor, because family means familiar, and most of all they need a home to come home to during and after university.

They need a safety net if things go wrong, and sometimes they do, because university life is a unique kind of semi-life.

It’s not like childhood and it’s not like adulthood.

Students are semi-dependent, semi-adult and semi-mature, but they want to believe that they are fully independent and grown-up and so that’s how they behave, sometimes with awful consequences.

For parents like my sister, left (almost) home alone and worrying about their semi-adult child, it’s easy to fill that empty nest with tears and fears.

In her case, I think she’s the one who needs the support at the moment rather than her son, who’s loving every minute of his new life and, in that typical self-absorbed way of the young, is not worrying at all about the mother he’s left at home worrying about him.

And that’s how it should be. We’re the ones who’ll be taking care of her.