You own a policy on your child, you've been funding it for fifteen years, and now they're an adult with a job. The question of whether to hand it over has a few moving parts.
Mechanically the transfer is quick. The carrier has an absolute assignment or change of ownership form, both parties sign, and the carrier records it. Ownership carries the control rights: who can take loans, who can change the beneficiary, who can surrender the contract. The insured stays the insured either way.
The consequences are where it gets real. Once they own it, they can surrender it. A twenty-three-year-old who wants a truck can cash out fifteen years of your funding, and you'll find out afterward. That's not an argument against transferring, it's an argument for transferring when they're ready rather than when they hit a birthday.
On the tax side, handing ownership over with no payment is a gift. It gets valued at roughly what the policy is worth that day. And it counts against your yearly gift exclusion and your lifetime exemption. Transferring it for payment can trip the transfer-for-value rule. In some cases that makes part of the death benefit taxable to whoever collects it. Nobody wants that outcome by accident. There are exceptions for transfers to the insured, which is often exactly the situation here. Estate considerations run the other way: keeping ownership means the death benefit may be includable in your estate. I'm a licensed insurance broker, not an attorney or a CPA, so this specific transfer should get run past both before you sign the form.
A lot of families take the middle path. Keep ownership, and tell the kid everything. What the policy is, what it's for, what it's built up to, and what you plan to do. Then transfer when there's a reason, like they're funding it themselves or they're borrowing from it for a house. Ownership follows the responsibility. It doesn't come first. What you can't do is transfer it and hope the conversation happens on its own.