Davina McCall has said she was “brutally honest” with her children about her previous struggles with drug addiction because she feared they may find out from the internet.
The television presenter, 50, battled substance abuse in her 20s.
Davina said she told her children – Holly, 16, Tilly, 14, and Chester, 11 – because she did not want someone else to tell them or for them to find out online.
Read more: Stacey Solomon makes a “controversial” decision about her kids
She said on the Happy Mum, Happy Baby podcast: “I’ve had to be (honest), because they have access to the internet.
“Actually, I had to be brutally honest quite early on when I thought other kids at school might talk to them about it.
“They grew up to ‘Mummy’s going to a meeting’ – they just didn’t know it was a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.”
She continued: “When each of them got to about 10 or 11 I’d say, ‘Let me explain what those meetings are’. I’d say, ‘Mummy had a problem but I stopped a long time ago and these meetings help me stay on the straight and narrow’.”
Davina said her children, from her former marriage with Matthew Robertson, were “all really very accepting”.
She said: “They’d say, ‘I thought it was something like that. Is that why you don’t drink?’
“Kids know stuff. I never really give them credit for what they know, but they are smart like that.”
Davina announced last year that she and Matthew had separated after 17 years.
Davina later told This Morning that she and Matthew had agreed never to discuss their split in public.
“Just for the record, for our kids’ sake, Matthew and I have both decided we are never going to talk about this,” she said.
“We have three kids, who are quite grown up, and we just don’t want to talk about it in the public eye, so that’s what we are doing.”
Davina previously opened up to This Morning about the moment she quit drugs and turned her life around.
She said her “rock bottom” came when she realised her friends and loved ones knew about her addictions despite her thinking she’d kept them hidden.
“It was my friend who said one thing to me that was my personal rock bottom, and it sounds really pathetic as all she said was, ‘Everybody is talking about you. You’re the talk of every dinner I go to, every coffee I have with friends. Everybody is talking about a mess you are.’
“I always wore make-up, had a job, never stole, never did the things other junkies did. I thought I was fine and fully-functioning but I wasn’t and everybody could see that. I thought, ‘My pack of cards has fallen down and I have to stop’.
“So it was a tiny thing at the end of months, years of degrading, feeling more and more self-hatred.”
Don’t miss out: Three steps to ensure you see all ED!’s latest news on Facebook