Spending time with extended family when your parents are struggling with infidelity comes with a unique challenge that is not often addressed in holiday survival guides: secrecy. 

Hobbies, by which I mean anything that you do regularly for pleasure that is both meaningful and enjoyable, are important ingredients to the joy of life. When you realize as an adult that you don’t have any hobbies, it signals that you are missing out, and it may mean that a past betrayal that you thought was settled needs a bit more attention.

Plus, how understanding transactions in relationships can help adult children of infidelity answer the question, Is Cheating Genetic?

After betrayal trauma, one side of the coin is the constant fear that you will uncover another secret. The other side is the constant fear that you are never doing enough.

In this post I will share my own techniques for how to stop fearing that you will be left, hurt, abandoned or betrayed all over again like you were in the past.

Women in the sandwich generation have gathered years of emotional intelligence that is dismissed by advice to “just put yourself first” as a way to cope with overwhelm.

From the hundreds of messages I have received from teens and young adults about their parent’s cheating, here are three crucial but often-missed factors to consider when speaking with your kids about infidelity.

Talking about your parent’s affair is a series of difficult conversations.

Trust is such a crucial building block of a healthy relationship, both one that you have, or one that you are working to create, say when you are dating.

Couples generally go through a few predictable stages after an affair is discovered. How you help depends on which stage your parents are in. I have simplified the stages so they are more relevant for kids (of any age) and extended families.

A myriad of emotions arise for children when they discover their parents’ cheating. Some, like anger or confusion, most people understand. Others are less obvious, highlighting the complexity of adultery for a child

Found out that one of your parents are cheating? If you decide that confronting your parents is the best route for you, here are 7 tips for success when speaking with your parents about their infidelity.

Around the holidays, lots of people talk about the need to set boundaries, say no to things, prioritize self care. But what if you have the opposite issue? What if your knee-jerk reaction is to say no when what you really want is to feel comfortable taking the risk of saying yes?

Many adult children grappling with a cheating parent say that one of the biggest issues is they want to want to spend time with their parents. But they don’t actually want to spend time with them. They want, sometimes desperately, for the love and connection that they felt with their parents before the affair came out to still be there. Often with the upheaval of the affair, the fighting, the secrets, the pain, it feels like it would be easier to just stop caring so much. It would hurt less.

What better time to examine your beliefs about commitment than during the decade when most of you are trying to figure out what you want in a relationship anyway? AND, you have the advantage of riding the wave of your brain’s natural growth spurt. So you will be creating the neural pathways in your brain that will help you form the long term relationships that you desire.

The secret is to use your relationship with your parents as a tool to tap into your own authenticity.

Many adult children who have discovered a parent’s affair say that they develop trust issues that linger long after they have dealt with the logistics of their parent’s infidelity.

While these trust issues often focus on other people, including friends, co-workers, and especially romantic partners, the solution for tackling these issues lies not in other people. It starts by re-building trust with yourself.

I can summarize what you will learn from an extensive on-line search about how you as an adult child should cope with a cheating parent in one sentence.

Part 3 of a 7 part series on Rebuilding Trust in the Parent-Child Relationship after Parent Infidelity, this post is especially for parents who have decided to stay together after infidelity. Accountability means that you own your mistakes, apologize and make amends for them, and this post offers six ideas for being accountable to your kids.

Simply put, reliability means doing what you say you are going to do. Not just once, but over and over again, so that others expect it of you. Here are five small, manageable steps that you can take as a parent to be more reliable for your kids, which will help rebuild trust with them.

I asked ChatGBT to write a blog post about the effects of parent infidelity on the kids and here are the results.

The first of seven posts about how to rebuild trust with your parents after their infidelity.

In this post, I will narrow in on the nature of estrangement in mother/daughter relationships, and offer my own thoughts on some solutions for daughters who are struggling with their moms post-parent infidelity.

Not all of the effects of growing up with a cheating parent are hurtful. With a little shift in perspective, some young adults are able to see and express what they gained along the way.

This post will help you on the road to healing from your parent’s infidelity by beginning with your essential question: What is the aspect of the affair that bothers you the most?

While each family situation is unique, this kind of reaction from your kids is common, and generally, it is not about you. In this post I offer the two most common reasons kids (of any age) blame the betrayed parent, and what you can do to cope with it.

Here are 7 tips to help you stop worrying about a parent’s affair, regardless of your parents’ relationship status, or how old you are.

In this post I will explain a little more about how culture mediates secrecy because it is not often discussed in the context of infidelity and I think kids of cheating parents (from all cultures) will find it helpful.

One often overlooked aspect of deciding to confront your parents about infidelity is secrecy. If you have found out that a parent is cheating, you are likely holding a secret. Before you consider confronting your parents, you need to know a bit more about secrets and what they do to you on the inside.

Especially for kids ages 12-17, thoughts on if you should confront your parents about their affair.

The first step to consider after finding out that your mom or dad is cheating.

This is a research round up of two related studies by the same author. Both look at the concepts of feeling caught between parents (also known as triangulation), and at rumination as it relates to parent infidelity. 

Sometimes it’s hard to know if your issues stem from growing up with a cheating parent. Here are three reasons that things gets confusing and how to cope.

This study points hopefully to a pathway to healing for kids of cheating parents. Healing means being able to understand your parents’ affair intellectually, and being able to be honest and open about the affair.

This research asks actual kids about their experience of parent infidelity while they are going through it, as opposed to all other research which asks adults to reflect on exposure to parent infidelity in their past.

Four books to help kids of any age dealing with parent infidelity, and the parents, teachers and therapists who support them.

Tips for therapists working with families where one parent has cheated.

Two moms model 4 important parts of communicating with your kids about infidelity.

Writing the memoir has changed me in ways that I am still not great at articulating. I updated my understanding of what happened to my family from the eyes of a child to the lens of an adult, which may explain why I can now think more clearly. I am calmer. I am more myself. 

This study tackles the question of topic avoidance in families coping with parent infidelity. While topic avoidance is common in families, even the perception of it can lead to unhappiness. If families are unable to put traumatic events into words over time this leads to suppression, rumination, and health issues.

Like anything else, infidelity carries its own set of beliefs, which begs the question, what is the intergenerational nature of infidelity? There have been few studies done on how infidelity is replicated through generations. This post will summarize these studies. 

This research is some of the first to explore the intergenerational effects of infidelity, and clearly indicates that children who grow up with cheating parents are twice as likely to cheat in their own relationships, even if they believe that infidelity is wrong.

This research concludes that parent infidelity and how happy parents are with their relationship are the greatest predictors of whether a child of infidelity will cheat in their own romantic relationship as an adult.

One of your parents has cheated on the other one. The secret comes out. You want to help. What do you do? This post describes four stages that couples go through after an affair is discovered, and how children, extended families, and friends can help at each stage.

This article describes a few factors that make it more likely that women who grow up with cheating fathers will cheat on their own romantic partners. Specifically, this article points to how parent infidelity may leave long-lasting misconceptions of trust and loyalty in romantic relationships.

How to encourage parents to speak with their children about infidelity.

The five ways that children typically learn about parent infidelity.

As a parent involved with infidelity, the decision to share the information with your kids is a difficult one. This post addresses the If, Why, When, What and How to speak with your children about an affair.

Feeling caught between your parents means that you feel like you need to side with one against the other. This article offers 5 ways that parents communicate with their kids about infidelity. Some make the kids feel caught, some do not.

Infidelity remains a complex topic, but this research sheds light on how young adults tends to include the outcomes of infidelity, such as pain, crying, sad, hurt, guilt, and heartbreak, as part of their definition of infidelity.

This post will take a closer look at the dilemmas that children face when they find out about parent infidelity, and then have to decide whether or not to share what they know. Secrets are tricky things, and both keeping family infidelity a secret, and sharing it with others, come with difficult consequences. 

This study tackles the question of who owns the story of parent infidelity. Once a child or family member discovers infidelity, do they share it? Does sharing it help?

This study gives language to how children understand why a parent affair happened. Children often see the reasons behind cheating as much more nuanced than they are given credit for, citing not only individual behavior but also historical or community circumstances. Parents do not need to be so afraid of admitting their infidelity to their children.

How is information about parent infidelity shared in a family? The takeaway here is that infidelity adds a layer of secret information in a family that needs to be managed, which takes mental and emotional effort and can cause stress.

Hint: it’s all about the conflict.

Statistically, children of infidelity are twice as likely to cheat on their partners. This post examines the myths and realities about this statistic and offers solutions for how children of infidelity can minimize their chances of repeating family patterns of infidelity.

A brief summary (in plain English) of Duncombe and Marsden’s 2004 article Affairs and Children, often cited as the foundation of Western scholarly research on the effect of parental infidelity on children.

A myriad of emotions arise for children when they discover their parents’ cheating. Some, like anger or confusion, most people understand.

As every couple’s therapist knows, infidelity presents a serious relationship challenge. Parents struggling with infidelity face the work of managing their adult relationship, while also caring for their kids.

Found out that one of your parents are cheating? Before you decide to speak with them about it, go back and read these posts.

Finding out about a parent affair often throws their kids into a dilemma. To confront the parent about the affair or not?

You have just found out that one or both of your parents is cheating. What do you do?

No matter how old you are, finding out that you have a cheating parent can be jarring.

One expat’s experience of the protests in Lebanon in October of 2019. 

Yoga can even teach you things about moving to Beirut. 

About halfway through that first birthday party, I questioned, albeit in haste, whether moving a child with severe nut allergies to the Middle East was a sound decision.

The conclusion of Feed Not Fight. 

Why listening to what your body wants to eat can be harder on summer holiday. 

Having now practiced self-demand eating for close to 25 years, in my experience refining it never really ends.

It is not lost on me that by most standards, I am a skinny white woman. Suddenly my self-consciousness about not being a skinnier white woman seems completely ridiculous.

An uninspiring visit with a pediatric nutritionist.