Drugs are every parent’s nightmare.

We all believe we know the cost, emotionally, physically and lastly economically, of drug addiction.

I remember when I was a lad my parents (particularly my dad) being paranoid about drug use.

One instance where I’d done something wrong (I forget what) but they hadn’t found out led to my parents sitting me down and taking me through the perils of drugs all the time while trying to match my nervous shiftyness with all the symptoms from a pamphlet on signs of drug use.

I cottoned on to what they thought I had being doing and in the end I had to come clean on what I’d actually done - probably something school-related that was deserving of a letter home - that had got me so uptight.

If I remember correctly I may have even been spared punishment as they were so relieved I wasn’t injecting heroin in the kitchen as they watched Auf Wiedershen Pet in the lounge.

One of the ‘trigger signs’ was always being up in your room. This is a pretty tricky one for both parents and teenagers.

Lets be honest, as a teenager you have a certain antipathy towards your parents and probably wouldn’t want to spend to much time with them.

And secretly your parents find your moaning, grumbling and harrumphing and bit of a pain in the backside, so are secretly pleased that they don’t have to subjected to eye-rolling and sighing on their choice of TV programmes of an evening.

And that (in a weird sort of way) used to be fine. Kids upstairs playing on a console or listening to music, claiming to have completed homework.

But as the internet has grown and developed, parents have become ever more worried about their children’s safety online with more and more parents setting up filters or checking on their children’s internet history.

But what about their internet usage - not in content, but sheer amount?

In a new study of more than 2,000 children, more than 40% believed they were addicted to the internet.

The research revealed that two thirds of 11 to 17-year olds take some sort of computer device with them to bed - whether that’s laptop, tablet or phone.

And of those taking their digital devices into bed only one third were using it for things like homework, while the two thirds majority used it for social networks or watching films, TV shows or playing games.

Experts say that realistically only around one to three per cent of people actually have internet addiction problems, rather than the four in 10 above.

But the nature of our world has changed. The internet is now so all consuming that parents have difficult choices to make; homework research is often done on the web, talking to friends is now regularly online, shopping is the same again.

There are lots of reasons why the internet is a wonderful thing but there must, inevitably, be some downsides to our ‘always on culture’.

The internet is fantastic but having the world at your fingertips can also be too all-consuming.

As I looked into this phenomenon I discovered that actually being addicted to the web is still somewhat disputed, whatever surveys say.

Gambling is the only non-substance related addiction recognised by many psychologists, but the web requires further study according to one of the main reports used by experts.

It also appears that there were similar fears over both radio and TV when they initially became mainstream but time showed those worries to be misplaced.

What is different about the web is accessibility and how it can be carried in your pocket as well as built into your day by school or work.

Maybe we should all think about taking a break from it every now and then - who knows, we may quite enjoy not being able to find everything out quite so quickly.