My mum only told me she loved me once. That's why I say it to my own daughters all the time, says Daisy Goodwin

Love you, darling.’ ‘Love you too, Mum.’ It’s the call and response that ends every phone conversation with one of my daughters. Sometimes it will be me who professes love first, sometimes them, but we know something is off if it doesn’t happen. It’s not a huge deal, but I know I feel better if we have made the effort.

Now aged 23 and 32, both have left home, but we speak most days on the phone.

It’s a casual thing, but like so many seemingly casual exchanges in families, it is freighted with meaning. At my end, I am telling my girls that whatever happens to them that day, they should know that I will always love them, unconditionally.

Daisy Goodwin with her mother Jocata. As a child, the only time I remember my mother telling me she loved me was when she was explaining to my brother and me that she was never going to live with us again, she writes

I might be ticked off that they have left behind the handmade snood I spent weeks knitting for them, or they have ‘borrowed’ my favourite earrings, but that doesn’t change the fundamentals.

So long as I am around, they have a trampoline of affection that is always going to cushion their fall. It won’t stop things hurting or protect them from harm, but it is there.

Of course, you may be reading this and think I am stating the bleeding obvious: don’t all parents feel like that about their children? And, if so, why do you need to tell them all the time? Surely actions speak louder than increasingly meaningless affirmations.

Some argue that the phrase ‘I love you’ has become so ubiquitous — casually dashed off to everyone from colleagues and new acquaintances to shop assistants and particularly helpful waiters — that it feels cheapened.

When presenter Stacey Solomon professed her love to her husband and son multiple times a minute — as well as saying it to the new families she meets — during her BBC show Sort Your Life Out recently, critics called for her to pack it in.

Aren’t we actually failing as parents, they argue, if we have to keep telling our increasingly coddled children that we love them; surely an adequately parented child should know they are loved without the need for all the performance and verbal pats on the head?

To those people, I can only say this: you are fortunate. Only people who’ve been lucky enough to grow up taking love for granted could be so dismissive or irritated by the three little words.

To have a parent who constantly reminds you of how much they love and value you is a priceless gift.

Daisy with her daughter Lydia. I have always been careful to tell my children that I love them when they don’t pass an exam or fail to get the job that they wanted, she says

My girls need to know — and hear, too — that my affection is not something that they can win or lose, Daisy, pictured with her daughter Ottilie in New York, writes

I was five when my parents divorced. My mother, the interior designer and cookery writer Jocasta Innes, left my father Richard, a film producer, for a younger man and a different life to the one that was making her so unhappy.

As a child, the only time I remember my mother telling me that she loved me was when she was explaining to my younger brother and me that she was never going to live with us again.

‘Don’t you love us any more?’ I asked.

‘Of course I love you, you silly goose, but I have to live somewhere else,’ she replied.

Even at five years old I knew that when your mother tells you she loves you there shouldn’t be any ‘buts’ involved.

I had a friend at primary school whose mother always used to hug and kiss her at the school gate when she came out. My friend used to blush and push her away, but I remember how envious I was of that unquestioning embrace.

I couldn’t help feeling that if I had been more lovable, then my mother would still be living at home. It has taken me a lifetime, and two children of my own, to realise that my mother’s decision to leave was just that, her decision, and that I bore no responsibility for driving her away.

My parents spent the next two years fighting for custody of me and my younger brother — a battle my father ultimately won. During these years, we children were sent to live with my paternal grandmother.

I still remember her Yardley lavender-scented hugs and the sturdy tweed lap. But above all I remember her saying: ‘I love you so much darling Daisy.’

She was always telling my brother and I how much she loved us. It was a warm patch of comfort in an otherwise bleak and bewildering landscape. At a time when my mother had pretty much disappeared, and my father was working abroad, this was something to hold on to.

Children are literal creatures and hearing the words, unprompted, matters. My grandmother had lived in India as a young woman and, like so many British people living there at the time, she sent her children, including my father, to boarding school in England when they were very young.

I suspect that she had always regretted not keeping her children with her, and her constant reminders of how much she cared for us were filled with the words she hadn’t been able to say to them.

It’s tempting today, when we seem to be in the middle of a mental health epidemic, to yearn for the simpler times of my grandparents’ generation, when feelings were felt, not expressed, less so medicalised.

But I think it is a good thing now that parents and children can talk openly about their love for each other without embarrassment. When I see my male friends hugging and kissing their grown-up sons, I feel nothing but relief.

As an adult, I have always been fascinated by difficult mother-and-daughter relationships — I write about the fractious one between opera singer Maria Callas and her mother Litza in my new novel, Diva.

Maria was not the favourite child, and Litza hardly noticed her until Maria began to show her incredible talent. Litza would tell her she loved her only when she sang, and so the young Maria grew up feeling that the only thing that was lovable about her was her voice.

That kind of conditional love is very hard to get over. When the soprano’s voice began to fail, it was a double blow: she was not only losing her livelihood, but also losing, she thought, the only reason that anyone would love her.

When I was seven my father remarried, and my brother and I went to live with him and my stepmother. Being a stepmother is not an easy role, and I don’t blame mine for not bathing me in unconditional affection. But her smiles were all for a job well done, not simply for existing.

Her attitude often left me with a feeling that the only thing worthwhile about me was that I was good at exams.

That is why I have always been careful to tell my children that I love them when they don’t pass an exam or fail to get the job that they wanted.

They need to know — and hear, too — that my affection is not something that they can win or lose.

When my girls were small, I used to read them a book called Guess How Much I Love You by Sam McBratney.

It features Big Nutbrown Hare and Little Nutbrown Hare, who vie with each other to express how much they love each other. ‘I love you to the Moon and back,’ says Little Nutbrown Hare.

My children were always trying to go one better than the Moon; to the universe and back, to the chocolate factory and back.

My mother would have thought the book was cloying and silly, but I found it reassuring that it openly tackled this question so fundamental to childhood: is a mother’s love really infinite?

I really didn’t mind how many times I read it.

It’s not just my children who get the ‘I love you’ treatment. I say it to other family members when saying goodbye — because I do love them and also because if I get run over by a bus, I want to leave them a good memory.

I also now say it to my closest friends, even if they don’t always say it back; friends of 30 years deserve to be cherished.

It’s a problem unique to the English language that we have to use one word for all the different kinds of love: parental, friendship, patriotism and romantic.

I may say it often but always with intention — it is absolutely not the verbal equivalent of the ‘xoxoxo’ that I put at the end of emails.

The question is, I suppose, whether declaring to my daughters that I love them makes me a more loving mother?

In my experience the answer is unequivocally yes. In the same way that the very act of smiling can lift your mood even when you feel utterly miserable, I think telling a child or a friend or a partner that you love them takes you a little bit further in that direction.

And if anyone thinks that all this expression of love makes children needy, then I can only say that in my experience that is not the case.

The people who made me feel confident and self-sufficient as a child were my grandmother and father, who smiles every time I walk into a room.

Their consistency meant I was able to internalise their love, and — unlike my mother’s anxiety-inducing declaration — made me feel buoyant against the world.

Take it from me, no child was ever harmed by being told they were loved by their parents.

It’s hard for parents to get it right, and I would never claim to be the perfect mother. But at least my girls know I will always love them to the Moon and back.

• Daisy Goodwin’s novel Diva (£20, Head of Zeus) is out now.