Mothers dread it and fathers aren’t particularly keen, either – and for our family it came and went last week.

It was the day we removed our daughter Holly from her home, along with half her possessions, and dumped her in Bournemouth (virtually on the other side of the world), where she has no proper friends, and callously abandoned her to a hostile and lonely world, defenceless and unprepared, telling her she can’t live at home again until she has endured it for three whole years.

Or at least, that’s how we felt: the cruelest parents in the history of the world.

Some people call it going away to university, and if you are parents of a certain age, it’s a day you just have to get over.

We expected tears. My wife was the bookies’ favourite, but it’s infectious, so Holly caught it as well, and I had to wipe a tear away too. But none of us were prepared for the mixture of emotions the parting would bring.

In fact, I don’t remember any situation with quite as many feelings, all competing for space in our heads: sadness, obviously, but also happiness, pride, self-pride, trepidation, pity, self pity, and a large helping of guilt.

The older you get, the more immature young people seem to be, and unprepared for a tough and unforgiving world, so our greatest wish was to be able to pass on all the things we have learned in the 40 or so extra years of priceless experience we’ve had, compared with Holly. Sat in her room at college, with the minutes ticking away before we had to leave her, we could think of a thousand more nuggets of advice we still needed to tell her, but you have to face facts and admit there’s ultimately only one thing for it, and that’s for them to learn it for themselves.

All I needed was for somebody to come along and say that “young people have it easy these days”, and I would have punched them on the nose. You would have to be a fool to believe that. Just because they seem preoccupied with the latest mobile phones and other frivolous things, it doesn’t mean they don’t also have the same worries we had when we were their age. The world hasn’t suddenly become more forgiving in the last generation.

At least today’s students have technology to help them through it. My own memories of going away to college are mostly clouded by sitting on a train on a cold Sunday night, ready to be hauled off into the black unknown, but now they can easily keep in contact with Basecamp Swindon while they are away.

And Facebook, which people like to malign as a devilish intrusion into our social lives, now provides a priceless chance for students to make friends with college colleagues and flatmates long before they actually go away.

But they still have to go through the difficult process of meeting new people, doing a whole raft of new things for themselves and walking into challenging situations where they don’t have family and old friends for support.

Having said all that, however, and despite having sat through a long, quiet and thoughtful journey home the other day, we also have the lovely feeling of knowing we have provided Holly with a golden opportunity to enjoy an unforgettable three years.

We are telling people she is at Arts University Bournemouth, but really she’s gone to the same college as all the other students leaving their parents for the first time this month. It’s called the University of Life.