Ava Williams* didn’t know what to say when her mom cried into her shoulder. At the age of 14, with no relationship experience, Williams could only rub her mother’s back in consolation after hearing the news: her mom had caught her father in bed with another woman.
“We just sat in my bedroom for hours,” Williams said. “I couldn’t help her. When you’ve just found out your husband of 22 years cheated on you, I don’t know if there’s much someone can say to make you feel better.”
While her mother was overwhelmed with grief, Williams found herself picturing what her family’s life at home might look like — what dinners would be like, who’d drive her to soccer practice, whether they’d celebrate Christmas together.
Over a decade later, Williams looks back on her experience both discovering her father’s infidelity and navigating its impact on her family.
“I still think about it a lot. I feel like things come up now and then that bring me back to it and make the anger and the resentment spill over,” Williams said. “It’s like any other trauma — it never really leaves you. Your parents are always going to be part of your life and so will this.”
Discovering infidelity
Children are often aware of the infidelities that occur in their parents’ relationship.
In a study that explored whether knowledge of parental infidelity affects the relational ethics of adult children, 40% of the 195 participants reported that they knew of at least one parental infidelity during their teenage years.
“Teens are a lot more intuitive than parents tend to think,” said Melissa Macomber, an author and former child and family therapy therapist. “If there is something going on in their parents’ relationship, they’ll very likely sense it on some level and try to find evidence for it.”
While some children do make an effort to search for explanations of any irregularity in their parents’ relationship, many discover issues such as infidelity in other ways.
According to Allison Thorson, a professor of communication studies at University of San Francisco, there are five main ways children find out about parental affairs.
The most common occurrence is learning through a family member who isn’t the parent who cheated. The second most common way children learn of infidelity is explicitly, which means they aren’t intended to learn about it, but find out somehow.
“When kids learn about cheating explicitly, it usually means they found something that, in one moment, let them know it occurred,” Thorson said. “Maybe they found some letters. Maybe they were borrowing their parent’s phone and a text message came up. Maybe they overheard something that immediately let them know their parent engaged in infidelity.”
The third most common way is that the child learns about the affair from the parent who was involved. In these cases, children may ask the involved parent if anything is going on, or that parent may voluntarily inform their children of the affair.
The fourth way children find out is “incrementally,” according to Thorson, meaning children put together small observations or realizations they had over a long time period to figure it out themselves.
Finally, children may also learn of parental infidelity from someone who is not a family member, though this situation is rare.
“It barely happens, but some children do find out intentionally and directly from someone outside the family circle,” Thorson said. “Sometimes, it was even the third person in the relationship — this rarely happened though.”
However, even with these five varied methods of discovering infidelity, there is no method that has proven to be better than another in regards to the child’s satisfaction.
“Unlike partner infidelity, for which there are definitely preferred ways of finding out your partner cheated on you, there is no best or worst way for children, which really surprised me,” Thorson said. “I was expecting that if you learned from the parent who engaged in infidelity that that would be the best way, but we didn’t find that. The children’s level of satisfaction in research didn’t differ based on how they discovered the information.”
A child’s reaction to finding out about parental infidelity largely depends on what they emotionally desire at that point in their life, as well as their own unique lens of the situation.
For instance, according to Thorson, some subjects in her study preferred discovering incrementally, as the idea of figuring things out on their own almost empowered them. When informed directly by a family member or either of the parents, some children appreciated the honesty, while others expressed frustration, believing that it wasn’t something they needed to know.
“Different kids at different places in their life might want one thing over the other,” Thorson said.
While the way children discover parental infidelity can affect them, it is often less impactful than other factors that more strongly shape their emotional outcome.
“The biggest factor is the extent to which kids feel ‘caught,’” Thorson said. “It’s how involved they are in their parent’s infidelity that really drives their experience.”
The emotional fallout
Becoming “caught” in infidelity can be formally referred to as triangulation.
Triangulation occurs when two people — often the parents — draw the child into the conflict rather than address each other directly.
In the context of infidelity, one parent may enlist the child as a confidant, messenger, or emotional supporter, effectively shifting the burden of adult relational issues onto a child’s shoulders. For example, a child might be told to keep a secret, choose sides, or comfort a parent in emotional distress — destabilising roles that should belong to adults.
“Often, when a child becomes triangulated between their parents, they become parentified,” Thorson said. “I knew someone who’d call her dad’s office, and whenever he was out with the third party, they’d tell her he wasn’t there. On the other hand, whenever the mom called, they’d lie and say he was there to cover for him. Situations like this place a big burden on the child who then feels like they need to keep a secret from the other parent.”
However, infidelity doesn’t only impend childhood, but adulthood as well. Many children who grew up amid betrayal struggle to form secure relationships later in life. Specifically, trust issues, anxiety, and fear of abandonment often follow these children into their own partnerships, according to Minnesota Counseling Therapy.
In Williams’ case, she had a hard time picturing herself in any romantic relationship for years after she first discovered her father’s affair, with the same feelings of fear and doubt continuing to linger even in her current relationship.
“I was just so scared that someone would do to me what my dad did to my mom,” Williams said. “For the longest time, I really thought my parents were so perfectly in love, and to see how I was wrong, how I couldn’t even tell the signs or have seen it coming — that just made me even more scared that I’d fall for someone only to get hurt.”
Some become overly cautious, checking for signs of dishonesty or keeping emotional distance to protect themselves. Others may repeat what they saw, entering unstable or secretive relationships.
In fact, according to a study in the Journal of Family Studies, children who had unfaithful parents were twice as likely to cheat in the future.
However, according to Thorson, some children shared that they weren’t largely affected by their parent’s infidelity.
“I’ve found that everyone’s experience with infidelity is very different. Sometimes, I’ll talk to a kid whose parents’ relationship involved infidelity, and they’ll say, ‘You know what? My parent was a great parent. They were kind of a crappy wife or husband, but they were always a good parent,’” Thorson said. “This separation of roles helps mitigate their reaction to things, so what’s happening between their parents feels very separate.”
While every child’s experience is unique, for many, parental infidelity leaves an emotional toll on children that is often difficult to escape. However, as both Thorson and Macomber emphasize, the most effective way to cope with these feelings is through intentional, open communication.
“It’s not the kind of thing where you sit down once, talk it out, and it’s over,” Macomber said. “It’s an ongoing conversation. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.”
An evolving conversation
The impact of parental infidelity isn’t something that can be resolved in a single talk at the dinner table.
Macomber discovered her mother’s long-term affair when she was 13. Having gone through years of therapy and personal work herself, Macomber emphasized that families must work together to approach the topic with care and intention as the child grows and as their emotional capacity changes.
According to her research, the effects of an affair can be analyzed by considering three age groups: children under 12, adolescents between 12 and 18, and adults over 18.
With children who are yet to enter their teenage years, Macomber shared the importance of offering clarity and validating their observations.
“If mom and dad are fighting, admit that. Don’t try to hide it in any way. It’s going to help the child have faith in their intuition if the parents are just honest,” Macomber said. “It’s also important for the parents to remind their child that it’s not their fault and to remind the child that they love them. Those are the three big things to communicate to younger children.”
When discussing infidelity with children in their teenage years, parents can talk about the nature of the affair a little more in depth, bringing in more mature topics such as sexuality.
“Teenagers are just going to know more. They see more. They understand more. Not only do they have a deeper understanding of things like technology, meaning they could look things up, but they also know more about sexuality,” Macomber said. “Parents are going to want to consider how to bring this up, not in terms of physical details, but how the nature of the affair might affect the child’s world.”
Other factors to consider are how tied to a child’s community the affair is. For instance, if the cheating parent’s partner was someone the child knew or interacted with frequently, that’s a detail parents should bring up to their teenager in order to help their understanding in the long term.
Finally, once the children become adults, another part of the conversation comes in: How does this affect the child’s understanding of relationships?
“If you think about it, a 13-year-old finding out about an affair is going to be pretty different from even a 16-year-old finding out about it, because at that later point in those teenage years, kids are trying to build their own worldview. They’re trying to figure out what they want in their own relationships.”
This formative period leaves teens especially impressionable, making them more likely to absorb and later replicate the patterns they grow up around.
According to Macomber, a common misunderstanding about the impact of parental affairs is that children merely replicate their parents’ behavior, with many assuming the effects surface only in overt ways, such as a child eventually engaging in infidelity themselves.
“It’s true that parental infidelity can lead to children getting involved with someone who cheats on them or to cheat themselves, even if they believe that having an affair is wrong,” Macomber said. “But observing the patterns of interactions between your parents can also be the thing that leads to infidelity. You take it on without realizing it. You end up repeating the behavior again and again.”
Having gone through the healing process herself, Macomber shares that the most important thing for children who are struggling with parental infidelity is to remember that it’s not their responsibility to solve the problem.
“At some point, you have to realize you’re never really going to fix your parents. It’s not your mess to fix,” Macomber said. “So you’re better off spending your energy talking to them and figuring out what those patterns that came up in their relationship are so that you don’t repeat them yourself.”
Healing together
Only a few months ago, at her dream venue of New Jersey’s Crystal Plaza, Williams got married to her husband, who she has been dating for six years.
“For a while, I really struggled romantically. For some reason, I felt like what happened to my parents was written in stone for me,” Williams said. “I just remember having all these hypothetical fears about my relationship that I had no way of knowing were true.”
While what happened between her parents affected her deeply, Williams notes that what helped her learn to move forward with the grief was continuing to talk about it with her mother. Addressing the situation openly, without rendering it forbidden or sensational, gave her the footing she needed to understand the situation and move forward.
“It comes up a lot when we’re by ourselves. Sometimes, we just talk about things we’ve already known or talked about together. But it’s nice. It’s nice to not have it be some sort of taboo and instead something we can repeatedly face together,” Williams said. “I’m really thankful for her. I’m really thankful to know that I’m not going through this alone.”
*This source’s name has been changed to protect their privacy in accordance with Carlmont Media’s Scot Scoop Anonymous Sourcing Policy
