"I love you." "Well, duh..."

All relationships are filled with subtle games and ongoing unconscious conversational tête-à-tête. For example: We all say things like "How was your day?" and "Did you sleep well?" without actually thinking about what they mean, or even awaiting an answer. In our family, one of the most frequently uttered is the "I love you—I love you, too" exchange.

I often take for granted those snippets of banter. But yesterday, as I was driving Ella to volleyball practice, something happened that made me think about it a little more.

Out of the blue, Ella says: "Dad, I love you."

"Of course you do!" I reply. "I'm awesome!!!"

"Uh," she says, with prototypical tween-dramatic-annoyance inflection, "not the response I was looking for but...okkaaayyy."

I laughed as she squirmed for a bit before reciprocating her sentiment, and also waited with breath held to see if I had really hurt her feelings. Thankfully, Ella is fully aware of my penchant for silliness and sarcasm, and is also quite adept at flinging it back to me. Nevertheless, I started thinking about what it might mean to a child to have his or her overt, unprompted volleys of love and affection returned in kind. Or not.

From what I've read and observed first hand with my own kids and others I have spent some time with, those little psyches can be fragile. Yes, it's important for them to become self-reliant and able to deal with adversity, but I think it's more important for them to first feel secure and develop a high level of self-worth. These values need to be constantly reinforced, at least until they start to navigate the world on their own.

I don't think that telling a kid we love them on a regular basis amounts to overly coddling or infantilizing them. On the contrary, it continually reinforces that Mom and/or Dad (or Mom and Mom, or Dad and Dad, whatever the case may be) thinks they are worthy of their place in the universe. Better to be loved too much—is that even possible?—than not enough. My parents did it to me and my sister, and while I admit that at the time I thought I HATED it, I realized once I hit my early 20s and then again once I had my own kids that all that annoyance and irritation was not only a genuine expression of love, but also might have been part of a carefully thought-out plan.

Of course, my little joke with Ella and her reaction brought to mind the possibility that their plan backfired, in the form of my absurdly overinflated sense of self-worth. (Inflategate, anyone?) But I doubt it. I'm probably just that awesome, and of course Ella would love me.

But I sure do love her, too, and she definitely knows it.