By HILARY STOUT

It is happening more often as populations age and the economy continues to ail: moving into the home in which you grew up and trying to make it your own.

In some cases, the arrangement enables the older generation to find a quick and trustworthy buyer for a home that must be sold.

But the transition can be fraught. When you make changes to your family’s house, you are messing with memories.

“Old childhood issues, they will be stirred up - be prepared,” warned Gail Thoen, a family therapist. “Either consciously or unconsciously, you came of age in that house. Sigmund Freud would just love to analyze this.”

Amy Goyer, 49, is the “family expert” for the AARP, an American organization for retired people. But her professional experience did little to prepare her for the feelings that surfaced when she took over her parents’ home so her parents could move into a senior care facility.

“The act of moving from my little bedroom, which was the guest room, to my parents’ bedroom was really hard,” she said. “It’s strange. There’s a certain element of feeling guilty. Not guilty because I did anything wrong, but sort of like survivor’s guilt.”

Carla Weisberg, a 47-year-old textile designer, grew up in an apartment in New York’s Greenwich Village that her parents bought in 1960 . Six years ago, after her mother died suddenly and her father’s health began to decline, she moved back to the place where she used to build forts and play hide-and-seek, while her father moved into the ground-floor unit.

To turn her parents’ home into a home for herself and her husband, she had a plan: She intended to keep at least one or two things in each room that belonged to her parents, out of respect . But there would also be structural and aesthetic changes, “to make the place more ours.”

When her father, an affable man, came up for a look during the construction, he said, “Well, you’ve ruined it.”

One of the things that upset her father the most were the gold-and-blue tiles with lions around the fireplace. He and his wife had bought them on a trip to Spain and Morocco before Carla was born. Ms. Weisberg and her husband had removed them and replastered the fireplace, leaving it a simple white, with no tile at all.

Ms. Weisberg said she understood her father’s reaction, particularly since he was entering the early stages of dementia. “My father was experiencing all kinds of losses of his autonomy,” she said. “I tried to not take it personally.”

Today the apartment is a blend of Ms. Weisberg’s textiles and wallcoverings and a few of her parents’ cherished possessions. Upstairs, though, the master bedroom is almost unrecognizable ? intentionally so. “It’s a little odd to sleep where your parents used to sleep, but we changed the space enough that it felt fresh,” Ms. Weisberg said.

As for the fireplace tiles, her father saved some and a friend made a side table out of them, so he could have a keepsake of the old apartment.

For Linda Harvey, it was essential to transform her parents’ house in Evanston, Illinois, not just on the inside but on the outside as well.

Ms. Harvey’s parents bought the house in 1973, when Linda was in first grade. In time, university and adulthood took her far away. She married, and eventually she and her husband moved back to the area for professional reasons.

Soon after, Ms. Harvey’s mother received a diagnosis of breast cancer, and it became increasingly apparent that the big house was becoming too much for her parents to maintain.

Ms. Harvey and her husband talked. It’s a wonderful house, she recalled saying. You already love the neighborhood and the community. Why don’t we buy it ourselves? They did, but agreed “to do a few things immediately to

make it our own home,” she said, beginning with altering the facade.

“When I drive up to the house, I need to have something visually that cues me that it’s not the same house,” Ms. Harvey, now 43, said.

There were more changes inside. A stone floor became hardwood, and they broke through the wall between the kitchen and breakfast room . Her father, Monte Levinson, a retired physician, recalled his shock . But he has since changed his mind.

“You know what?” he said. “It proved to be the right thing for their young family.”