Owen's 'I love you' silence sparks debate on parenting, masculinity and culture

Michael Owen, the England football legend, said something last week that stopped a lot of parents mid-scroll. In a podcast interview with Jamie Laing, he revealed that he has never told his four children he loves them. Not once. He said he assumes his actions speak for themselves, that the words feel unnecessary. "I just assume my actions would show them that I love them," he told Laing. "I think most of us are like that."

The comment landed differently depending on who was listening. Some parents nodded along—they recognized themselves in Owen's approach, the belief that presence and provision are enough, that saying the words feels soft or unnecessary or simply not how they were raised. Others recoiled. One father of a seven-year-old called the stance "awful" and insisted children need to hear those three words, regardless of circumstance. Online, parents urged each other: tell your kids you love them every day, even when it annoys them.

What Owen's comment exposed, though, is not a simple divide between right and wrong parenting. It revealed something more textured: the ways that culture, gender, generation, and personal history shape how we express affection to the people closest to us. Dr Patricia Britto, an educational psychologist, says the real issue is not whether a child hears the words but whether they feel "safe, valued and emotionally secure." A child told "I love you" repeatedly by a parent who never shows up to their games or performances may not feel loved at all—just hear empty repetition. But a child whose parent is consistently present, engaged, and attentive may feel that love clearly, even if it goes unspoken.

Aaron Dale, who hosts a parenting podcast and has written about raising boys, frames it differently. He argues that words and actions should not compete; they should work together. "Words are to speak the message and actions are the evidence," he says. Dale's own father taught him this lesson, though painfully—the man would say "I love you" after letting his son down, which only hollowed out the phrase. For Dale, the ideal is both: the consistent presence and the verbal affirmation, reinforcing each other.

Owen's reluctance to say the words—his description of it as something he would "love to be a little bit soft" enough to do—points to a particular kind of masculinity, one that many fathers inherit without questioning it. Dale and Britto both suggest this stems from generational and cultural conditioning about what men are supposed to be: providers, not emotional expressers. "The belief of what men should and what men shouldn't do" is, Dale says, "the dangerous part." Men are more than providers. They have emotional capacity. Their presence matters as much as their paycheck.

But culture complicates the picture further. In some cultures, the phrase "I love you" is rarely used at all. In Nigerian culture, Britto notes, parents might ask "Have you eaten?" as their primary expression of care. She grew up in Nigeria and never heard those words from her parents, yet felt loved completely. Older generations of British fathers, too, often operated on the assumption that actions were sufficient—and many of their children grew up knowing they were loved, even without hearing it said aloud.

What Owen's comments have done is force a conversation about what children actually need. Not whether words or actions matter more, but whether both together create something neither can alone. Dr Britto's question cuts to the heart of it: Do children feel loved? Do they feel wanted? Do they feel that they matter? The answer to those questions might come through words, through presence, through consistency, through cultural practice—or through some combination that looks different in every home. What matters is that the child knows, without doubt, that they are valued. How that knowledge arrives is less important than the fact that it arrives at all.