You Can Go Home Again . . . : Families: . . . but it’s hard. Even after you’ve grown up, going back for a visit can recall the good old--and bad--days when you were just a kid.

It was the sort of suffocating Sunday that frazzles the nerves. Julie Cohen, home for vacation from Toronto, was taking her mother from Northridge to visit friends in Malibu.

“So my mother said, ‘Well, here’s how you go,’ ” recalls Cohen, a 35-year-old writer who prizes her independence. “ ‘You go down the 405 to Sunset and out to the PCH and then up north.’

“I said, ‘Why don’t you take Topanga Canyon?’

“She goes, ‘Well, I don’t like driving Topanga Canyon.’

“But I was driving, so I said, ‘Well, I’m taking Topanga Canyon; it’s the shortest way there.’

“It was like a power play.”

Cohen’s voice, which has risen nearly an octave, softens: “There’s a shift now. My mom’s 70. I’m feeling more like the adult.”

In patterns similar to Cohen’s, adult children from 25 to 60 are beginning the summer ritual of crisscrossing the continent to spend a few days or weeks with the people who raised them.

Propelled by the homing instinct, they return to butt heads with the old parental icons, quibble furiously with their sisters and brothers and, relieved of their independence, to encounter themselves as defensive, Angst- ridden 15-year-olds once again.

“Trips back home are likely to be very chaotic,” warns psychologist and USC professor Chaytor Mason.

“When they go home, people tend to regress,” he explains. “Regression is a good thing on one hand, but it can also lead to childlike behavior, emotional outbursts and the unresolved problems of growing up.”

When falling back on the defensive tactics of parent-child relationships, even hard-nosed business executives “can become very meek or truculent,” Mason says.

Parents may also reinforce the grown child’s return to infantile behavioral techniques, says Dr. Gary Small, associate professor of psychiatry at UCLA and author of the book “Parenting Your Parents.” “Sometimes they are unwilling to see us as independent, autonomous adults.

“Many parents feel that their lives are empty when their children leave the nest. There’s a wish to bring back that fullness by treating their children as if they’re still growing up in the house.”

To a reasonable degree, however, being coddled and cradled is simply “great,” he says.

“It’s a very basic drive to want to be cared for,” Small says. “When we are born into this world, most of us are fortunate enough to have parents to nurture and buffer us from the cruel reality of leaving the womb. We become independent adults, but when we get back into our original home, it is natural for these feelings of wanting to be taken care of to re-emerge.”

Indeed, there is security in the past. A man has his father’s footsteps, a woman her mother’s laugh. And so each generation winds out the thread of continuity.

For a trip back to the growing pains of adolescence, adults will forfeit--albeit briefly--career status, even years of autonomy, in a clear sense of priorities.

Still, regression, as most find out, can lead back down a road of pitfalls. According to Mason, reactions can range from sulking to blatant rebelliousness--foot-stamping and actually breaking things around the house.

“We haven’t gotten the old scores settled,” he states. For instance, “ ‘Mama always liked you better’--that still goes on when we’re 50 or 60.”

But even when the trip promises more anguish and warfare than people normally want to cope with, they nevertheless make the trek. Primarily they go out of duty and guilt, Mason states: “They feel they would be rejected by other people if they didn’t--’You never go see your parents.’ Or they think they might lose competitive status with Harry, who always goes home.”

When they do return, most people, like Cohen, find parent-child relations become a seesaw affair, and fighting for the metaphorical driver’s seat is a routine tussle.

If the car isn’t the battleground, trouble will probably arise while vying for Father’s approval, wrangling over who’s raising the grandchildren anyhow or tangling with childhood desperations. And yet, in the end, most sojourners at the family hearth will pluck an ember of lasting warmth from the turmoil.

Muses Cohen: “I think where you were born and raised is home, no matter what.”

Still, for some, watching their parents age, home is a place of special conflicts. “There is still a part of us that at a psychological level looks to our parents for emotional support,” Small says. “This is a problem when parents need our care.”

For 59-year-old Joanne Raksin, a Hollywood mother of two grown children, trips back to Bay City, Mich., to visit her 85-year-old mother are rife with discordant sentiments.

“I cannot do it joyfully,” Raksin says. Her mother is slipping into senility, and days are spent reading to her, taking her to movies or simply sitting by her side.

Moreover, the small, spare house where Raksin was born and the town she recalls as dull and flat evoke difficult memories of lonely, introverted years as an only child.

“I wanted to escape to a more glamorous world,” says Raksin. Now a sculptor, she remembers how her practical-minded Lutheran parents--she a nurse’s aide, he a bookkeeper--were set on her becoming a secretary.

One winter’s evening, as a 14-year-old, she did escape, crawling out of her bedroom window in her pajamas and sitting shivering in the snow.

“What I wanted was for my mother and father to come running out and say, ‘Oh, where were you? We worried so about you. Oh, are you all right?’ I wanted them to hug me and care for me. But they didn’t even know I was out there. They were busy in another room.”

The dramatic moment passed and, shamefaced, Raksin climbed back into her room.

“I think of being confined in that room. I remember that feeling of having to escape, of getting out of this closed-in, suffocating situation,” she says. “Every time I look at the window, I remember, here was my freedom. It’s a strong memory.”

But if it’s difficult to return home alone, bringing back offspring has agonies all its own.

At the mention of her family’s annual July journey from Rochester, N.Y., to see her mother and father in Milwaukee, Adrienne Morgan groans. Never mind just getting there--an 800-mile test of fortitude endured with her husband, their 2-year-old daughter and 4-year-old son. It’s that everybody is judging your children, she explains.

“It starts immediately when we walk in the door,” says Morgan, 31.

And the criticism begins to fly: “We’re not feeding them enough leafy greens, they have terrible table manners,” Morgan enumerates. Then there is the real issue: discipline.

Morgan’s mother, now 53, sends her daughter books on building her children’s self-esteem--hardly the way Morgan remembers her mother’s methods. “She’d say, ‘If you guys keep driving me crazy, I’m going to leave.’ We’d go, like, ‘Yeah, sure, try it.’

“I told her that one day and she said, ‘Oh, no, never say that to your children!’ I said, ‘But Mom, I remember your saying that to me,’ and she said, ‘Yes, and I probably scarred you.’ ” Morgan laughs.

On the other side, Morgan’s father is a strict disciplinarian who governed his daughters with the help of an old leather belt dangling on a hook in the back hall closet.

On their last trip, the grandparents’ differences erupted into minor pandemonium.

“My son was being really loud and rambunctious and jumping around,” Morgan says. “My dad said, ‘Please stop that.’ But he kept doing that. So Dad grabbed him and spanked him. My son cried and ran to his father. My mom started crying and said my dad had ruined our trip. And it made me upset.”

If it’s not the children, it’s the siblings who provoke the friction.

Paul Brounstein, 49, a Los Angeles father of two, says he has been competing with his brother for their father’s approval for most of his life. His brother shared an interest in sports with his father, while Paul liked cars. His brother earned an MBA and works in a high-paying advertising job in New York; Paul skipped college, though now, working as manager of an arts supply store, he feels the two brothers have attained parity.

“I’ve forgotten about the person I could have been or the person I needed to be. All that stuff has been put behind me,” he says, though he adds, “It’s taken time.”

With time, children also learn that their parents do not live forever.

When Bill Jamme, a 44-year-old accountant who lives in Dallas, lost his mother four years ago, the tone of his annual summer trip to Albuquerque, N.M., changed definitively. Jamme has two sisters and seven children of his own, and his father still lives in the house where Jamme was raised.

The kitchen is virtually identical to the way it always was, with the same drop-leaf maple table and five matching chairs, as well as the old-fashioned heavy black telephone.

Through high school and trips back home, the children would sit around the table and talk with their mother, drinking coffee and eating ice cream, until late at night.

“That was home,” says Jamme. “It’s not as much that way anymore.”

The table is now piled with a widower’s sundry accumulations, and Jamme’s talks with his father, usually about taxes, occur in his office. They are a sort of host and guest.

Still, Jamme, like most adult children, faithfully returns to the homestead. He drives by his high school, visits childhood friends and catches up on news with the neighbors.

It is a typically bittersweet journey. And as psychologist Mason confirms, most of his patients return from their experiences drained: “They say, ‘I’m never going to do it again’--until the next year.”