If I wanted to, I could come up with a dozen excuses. I was fired after a long day of work

. Or maybe I was hungry. The simple truth is, when I walked into the living room and my 12-year-old son looked up at me and said. "I love you," I didn't know what to say. For several long seconds all I could do was standing there and staring down at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. He must need help with his homework was my first thought. Or he's going to hit me up for an advance on his allowance. Or he's assassinated his brother—I always knew it would happen someday—and he's trying to prepare me gently for the news. Finally I asked, "What do you want？" He laughed, and started to run from the room. But I called him back. "Hey, what was that all about？" I demanded. " Nothing," he said, grinning, "My health teacher said we should, tell our parents that we love them and see what they say. It's sort of an experiment. "

The next day I called his teacher to find out more about this "experiment. " And, to be truthful, to find out how the other parents had reacted. "Basically, most of the fathers had the same reaction you did," my son's teacher said. "When I first suggested we try this, I asked the kids what they thought their parents would say. They all laughed. A couple of them figured their folks would have heart attacks. " Some parents, I suspect, resented what the teacher had done. After all, a junior-high-school health teacher's job is to teach children how to eat balanced diets and brush their teeth properly. What does saying "I love you" have to do with that？ It is, after all, a personal thing between parents and their children, nobody else's business. "The point is," the teacher explained, "feeling loved is an important part of health. It's something all human beings require. What I'm trying to tell the kids is that it's too bad we don't all express those feelings. Not just parents to children and not just boys to girls. A boy should be able to tell his buddy that he loves him. "

The teacher, a middle-aged man, understands how difficult it is for some of us to say the things that would be good for us to say. His father never said those things to him, he admits. And he never said them to his father — not even when his father was about to die. There are a lot of us like that. Men and women, who were raised by parents who loved us but never really said so. It is a common reason for the way many of us behave.

But as an excuse it is starting to wear thin. Our generation has devoted a great deal of attention to getting in touch with our feelings and verbalizing our emotions. We know, or should know, that our children — sons as well as daughters — need more from us than food on the table and clothes in the closet. We know, or should know, that a father's kiss will fit as comfortably on the cheek of a son as on that of a daughter.

So when my son came to me that evening for his bedtime kiss—a kiss that seems to be getting briefer every night—I held on to him for an extra second. And just before he pulled away, I said in my deepest, most manly voice, "Hey, I love you too. " I don't know if saying that made either of us healthier, but it did feel pretty good. Maybe next time when one of my kids says, "I love you," it won't take me a whole day to think of the right answer.

Why did the author's son say "I love you" one day when he arrived home？