For Therapists, Teachers and Helpers: How to Encourage Parents and Children (of any age) to Discuss Parent Infidelity

Maybe you are a couple’s therapist working with two parents struggling with infidelity in their relationship. Or maybe you are a child’s therapist, who knows that the parents are going through an affair. Experience tells you that some open family communication would help, but parent infidelity is so hard to talk about that no one wants to dive in.

How do you help the family? 

Ideally, the parents would begin the conversation. As you surely know, there are loads of hurdles for parents coping with infidelity to overcome in order to do this. Such as, the belief that it is their business alone. Or, the fear that their kids will hate them. Or, the belief that the conversation will somehow scar the kids for life. I believe that the benefits of discussing parent infidelity far outweigh the potential drawbacks. 

Here are 5 research-based reasons for parents to discuss their infidelity with their children:

1. There is a good chance that the kids already know

Many children of infidelity already know, or at least intuit, that something is wrong between their parents.

According to three different studies, 24-40% of children know about their parent’s infidelity. How do they find out? There are several documented ways, like finding out on their own, figuring it out over time because of a variety of clues, but the most common way is that someone tells them. Usually someone in the family, but often, someone else involved in the affair.

These are just the children who can tell you that they know. Children who are too young to be verbal still know when mommy or daddy is acting differently. Affairs rock people, for good reason. It can make parents more emotional, quick to yell, more forgetful, and more emotionally distant from their kids. Children of all ages pick up on these changes. Young children particularly who do not understand what is going on, often erroneously blame themselves for their parents’ behavior changes. 

2. Keeping secrets is stressful on kids

If children of infidelity already know about the affair, but feel that they need to keep the information secret, they are put in a situation where their brain is literally at war with itself. For more information on the biology of this, read this post. 

Holding on to a secret creates an emotional burden for children (anyone, really) that increases the longer the secret is kept, and is connected to mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and even the increased progression of disease. 

The stress of keeping parent infidelity a secret increases with a child's perception of the vigilance needed to keep the secret. For example, making sure to evade certain conversations or being afraid of slipping up. The more that the secret overlaps into different social networks, the more stressful it is to keep.

Perhaps most prominently for children of infidelity, keeping secrets exacerbates a sense of isolation. This isolation itself can lead to greater fatigue.

3. It keeps them from Feeling Caught

What does it mean to Feel Caught? This is the term used for how a child feels when there is a loyalty conflict between their parents. That is, they feel that if they do what one parent wants them to do, it will jeopardize their relationship with the other parent. For more information about feeling caught read this post.

Getting the story of parent infidelity out into the open is the first step to helping children of infidelity not feel caught between their parents. When parents bring up the topic, they are signaling that they are managing the situation and that the child does not need to act as a mediator between them. 

4. It will increase the likelihood that parents will stay close to their children into adulthood.

I don’t know any parents who do not want a close relationship with their adult children, especially if they are hoping for grandchildren one day. This research demonstrated that children who have experienced parental infidelity and conflict between parents have poorer relationships with their parents as adults. As difficult as the conversation will be, parents could think of it as an investment in their future, the one that they want with their adult children.

5. Repeatedly, the research on children and parent infidelity has proven that how infidelity is discussed in a family IS AS IMPORTANT as the infidelity itself.

Infidelity is a searing thing for a relationship. It remains one of the greatest causes of marital conflict, and one of the most difficult issues to treat in therapy. Parents dealing with infidelity are overwhelmed, hurt, frightened, and perhaps at a loss for how to proceed. It is no wonder that parent infidelity often scars the entire family. But it does not have to. The research is clear that how infidelity is talked about has as much impact on a family as the infidelity itself.

Which means that it needs to be discussed. 

If you, as a therapist, teacher or helper, lead the way for families to speak about this terribly difficult and taboo topic, you will mitigate the ways that parent infidelity hurts not only the couple, but also the children and even the extended family.