C# - Accessing Data From A Dynamically Added Custom Control?

I am writing a survey generating system in asp.net. i asked an ealier question about the best way to create controls that can be passed about as variables. This was problematic with user controls so i was advised to use custom controls and a quick way to do this was to inherit from the panel control and just add a bunch of standard controls the the controls collection by overriding the CreateChildControls method. This way i could create my "survey" controls,which are basically Questions in the survey. THe question controls are then dynamically added to the page. This all works well but know i have come to the point that i want to try and retrieve the values from these controls and i seem to be lost in a nether world of of viewstates and page lifecycles. I can ensure that the dynamically added text boxes have a known ID, however even if i add the parent control in the page init handler the CreateChildControls method does not run until after until after the viewstate is loaded. I cannot work out how to retreive the values from these text boxes.