How often have you checked your phone today? How many times have you looked at your emails, or looked at the news, or maybe checked your Facebook page?

The answer, I suspect, is more than you might be happy with.

For many of us, smartphones have created a sort of nervous tic. We whip out the phone in almost any situation, from the living room to the commuter train, as a matter of course.

In the course of a few years, mobile phones have gone from being a handy tool to a sort of mental life-support system.

Bored? Restless? Slightly anxious for no reason? Don't worry. You’ve got a mobile to sort that.

The curious thing about taking out a mobile when you’re, say, on a train is you probably don’t really know what you’re going to do with it, or why.

Chances are you don’t really need to look at your emails, but you just do.

There’s unlikely to be a pressing need to check Twitter or Facebook, but it passes some time. This little device has become an emotional crutch.

And yet when our children do the same thing, we often become irate.

We accuse them of wasting time, ruining their eyesight, failing on their studies, ruining their ability to concentrate and inviting the attention of stalkers, groomers and various other bogeymen.

So are we necessarily cautious, or a generation of hypocrites?

In search of some answers, I’ve been to two events during the past week, both of them hosted by schools.

One was about e-safety; one covered our emotional attachment to electronic media. Both were utterly enthralling.

And the overriding message that came out of them was about understanding the world has changed, even if us middle-aged folk don’t care to notice, or try to pretend otherwise.

It’s not just we have to come to terms with the internet, but we need to understand how utterly pervasive it is to our children.

I remember a world without the web. I had a computer when I was a child, and it played games, but it was always me against the computer or, more rarely, me against the real person sitting on the seat next to me.

The games were clunky, if fun, but you had no idea if anyone else was playing the same game at the same time, or how well you were doing compared to them. Your computer life happened in isolation.

But our children are growing up in a profoundly different world.

Today’s teenagers cannot remember a time without the web, so they cannot imagine it.

And because the internet is now embedded into every aspect of our lives, it is utterly pointless telling them to ignore it, or to do something less boring.

It’s like saying “don’t wear shoes” or “don’t drink water”. The web is not an optional extra – it’s part of life.

The charity I listened to is called Signpost, and it’s based in Watford.

Its normal remit is to offer counselling and emotional support, at which its reputation is excellent, but they discovered so many people were talking about online issues that the charity began to take a special interest in that.

And what they seem to have discovered is today’s teenagers are, er, pretty much the same as any previous generation’s teenagers.

They don’t like to be told what to do, they make up their own minds, rebel against authority, seek the approval of their peers and sometimes act like a flock.

They do so with a mobile phone clamped to their hand, but, as the charity points out, these characteristics aren’t that different from the days when parents worried their children were being seduced into the world of mods and rockers.

Boundaries. That was a word that came up a lot, just as it would have done if my parents had been sitting in a school hall discussion 30 years ago.

Unless you’re going full Amish, you’ve probably come to realise computers, phones, tablets and the net are here to stay and our children will be happily living with them forever.

You can probably also guess that leaving them to play on computers when they should be going to sleep is a bad idea, just as it would be bad if they were up playing with toy cars or even Lego.

A computer in the room might not be very wise for younger children – but at what age is it acceptable?

How many parents, I wonder, allowed their children to have a television in the room but baulk at a computer. Is it really any different?

The simple fact is we can do four basic things – build a set of values that guide children in the way to make decisions, give them information about difficult topics, help them to make good decisions and then keep an eye on them to ensure things don’t go wrong.

Yes that applies to browsing the web (the word “surfing” seems to have died out, I notice) but it probably also applies to just about everything else – from going to school to learning how to ride a bike.

Those of us who remember the world before the web are now prone to see the world from a wonky perspective.

We have what the Signpost people refer to as “hindsight bias” – perhaps better known as rose-tinted spectacles.

Our memories of youth are full of endless summers and games of hide and seek and we tend to gently erase all the miserable and boring days, the rows we had with our parents, or the frustration with the world around us.

Yes, our children may seem to be in a constant whirl of communication, but if you recall those days when you had to ask your parents if you could use the phone for five minutes, you might decide we didn’t have it so great after all.

Yes, there are things we should learn about – filters, CEOPs, compulsive behaviour and PEGI ratings.

But I also think there are great things about this technology – the knowledge it makes available, the books, the ability to use your imagination rather than curtail it.

And yes, the games I should probably try playing with my kids.

I feel calmer now about my children’s relationship with the net, reconciled to the impact it has, less fearful of the impact.

For one thing, that sense of e-anxiety seems common to pretty much every parent; for another, the idea of parents worrying about their children is as old as life itself.