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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

The five ways that children typically learn about parent infidelity.

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 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.

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.