WITH the children home for the holidays, like all parents I worry about their health and happiness. Is the sunscreen strong enough? Why do they think strawberry ice creamc ounts as one of their “five-a-day”?

But, increasingly, these “real world” worries have been joined by fears about what is happening in their online world.

For our young people, there is no gap between these two spaces – to themtheir phones, tablets and internet connections are as vital as breathing.

But with this connectivity comes dangers and pressures for young people.

Recent research found that more than four out of five children aged 14 to 16 have viewed adult content online andmore than one-third of children have received a sexually explicit text or email – and parents are often appalled to find what sort of content their children are viewing on a daily basis.

As the adviser to the Prime Minister on internet child safety, I constantly hear of the problem, and how hard it is to protect children online even when you want to.

I have spentmuch of the past few weeks working on policies for amajor speech that David Cameron gave on this topic this week, and it was so good after almost three years of campaigning to seemany sensible ideas come to fruition.

He announced that we will see improved universal filters for under 18s onmobile phones and filtered public WiFi and that, by the end of this year, customers of the big four internet service providers will face an unavoidable choice – which will be age-verified – about whether to install content filters on their home broadband connections. And the new filters will cover all devices with one click.

With a tough new stance on blocking illegal child abuse images online, it feels like we are making real progress at last.