My earliest childhood memory is being pushed by my mother, Joan, around the streets surrounding our home in Ardingly, West Sussex, in a bouncy old-fashioned Silver Cross pram with lots of tassles and a white canopy. I would have been about 18 months old. I am the middle of three brothers. When I was five, I vividly remember them chasing me deep into a dark wood near our home with some sort of siren blaring in the background, and then them running away and leaving me there.

I wasn’t remotely academic. I was a late developer. I don’t think I really developed an interest in school until I was 18 and just leaving. I wasn’t a stickler for studying. My father, George, the former Bishop of Whitby, was a very remote figure. I lived in some fear of him, in part because he was a very large man at 6ft 7in. My father was an academic so I didn’t have an enormous amount in common with him.

We brothers weren’t particularly close. I was my mother’s favourite and my brothers were my father’s favourite. My mother discovered that I had musical talents. A gifted former Royal College of Music pianist, she saw that I was picking out harmonies when she was playing and I would sing along with her. She put me forward for a music scholarship at Winchester cathedral when I was seven, and I became a chorister.

Sadly, my paternal grandparents were dead before I was born. Both my parents were late arrivals. My granny was your typical granny – very small with scraggly white hair and glasses. She was very sweet. She lived in Guildford in a flat, which I loved visiting.

I was a very inquisitive wee boy. I was an excellent journalist, I observed everything going on around me and I recorded some of it. I wasn’t remotely sporty: I painted watercolours and sang. I was bullied growing up, which was a horrible experience. Being at choir school, I escaped that because I didn’t stand out and everyone else was interested in music too.

At eight, I was sent to boarding school – I was heartbroken. I found leaving home very, very difficult, but once I was at school, I fitted in easily because I was so in awe of being part of the musical fabric at Winchester cathedral. But it was the end of my family life as I’d known it. I got very short holidays, as I was practising or performing with the choir during them. I enjoyed the camaraderie at school and became independent sooner than most children.

If you take a child out of the family so young, you never really recover. My brothers also went to boarding schools, but not the same one as me, so after I turned eight, we didn’t really grow up together.

I have two adult daughters now, Leila, 33, and Freya, 30. Leila runs a teashop in Highgate, north London, and Freya is a lawyer specialising in social issues. I have an incredibly close relationship with them.

I don’t dare to give any parenting advice because I don’t pretend to be an expert myself. However, I do worry that kids these days are too glued to their electronic devices and I worry about the negative issues that come from that, such as cyberbullying, peer pressure and sexting. We need to go back to basics, reading to children at night, because it’s an invaluable bonding experience and gives them a thirst for learning.

• Jon Snow supports the charity Beanstalk, which provides one-to-one literacy support in primary schools to children struggling with reading. Visit www.beanstalkcharity.org.uk or call 020-7729 4087 to sign up as a volunteer reading helper or to find out about the other ways you can support the charity.