How a Parent’s Affair Can Lead to Emotionally Neglected Kids
The impacts of growing up emotionally neglected are well documented and include difficulty making decisions, profound loneliness, debilitating shame, and a deep lack of faith in one’s inner compass.
Most people can intuitively understand how growing up with a cheating parent can lead to trouble trusting others as an adult, especially in romantic relationships. Less often discussed are the ways that infidelity in a family is connected to childhood emotional neglect.
Often, a parent’s infidelity is not the cause of the emotional neglect, but rather a symptom of unhealthy family relationships that lead to children feeling emotionally neglected. In this post I will explain how a parent’s affair can be part of an overall pattern of emotional neglect in a family.
What is Emotional Neglect?
Emotional Neglect is defined not by what happened in childhood, but rather by what was missing. Childhood trauma is often the result of an event (incarceration of a parent) or a behavior (physical abuse). Emotional Neglect is a form of childhood trauma defined by what was missing from your life. Specifically, routine emotional disengagement.
There are two types of emotional neglect. The first is unintentional. For example, one parent dies at a young age, and the other parent does not have the emotional bandwidth to manage their own grief along with their child’s. Other causes include extreme poverty, racism, and mental illness. It can also be that parental infidelity falls into this bucket. Parents are so overwhelmed by the infidelity that they are unable to manage their children’s feelings about it too.
Willful emotional neglect however is quite different. In this case “willful” means that a parent doesn’t want to put in the work to have a healthy relationship with their child.
Often this happens because parents have their own childhood trauma that they have not worked through, so they are avoiding the inevitable challenges of having any close relationship, even with their child.
Regardless of the reason, these parents want their kids to be just fine regardless of what they do or don’t do.
One reason that people cheat is to avoid having the challenges and difficult conversations that are a natural and necessary part of a long-term committed relationship. It may be that the parent who cheats is simply not interested in having a connected relationship with their child. In this case, the affair is not the source of the problem, but merely a symptom.
Emotionally Immature Parents
A parent who chooses to cheat may also meet the criteria for an Emotionally Immature Parent. Some of the hallmarks of emotionally immature parents include:
Fear of genuine, especially difficult emotions
Avoidance of accountability; they rarely apologize
Low personal insight
Inconsistent and unreliable, especially emotionally unreliable
Setting a reasonable boundary results in huge reactions and as a personal attack
This is exactly the same sort of immaturity that might lead a person to cheat in a relationship. They use cheating as a way to get their needs met. So, rather than the affair causing the problem, it may be that the problem was already there. The infidelity was merely a symptom.
What all of this looks like in the context of a Parent’s Affair
Emotional Manipulation
I hear from so many kids of cheating parents that their cheating parent convinces them to stay quiet about the affair, because “it will only hurt your mom” or “I will lose my job”, or “You don’t want to break up our family.” Another common message is, “This isn’t your problem.” Or, “It doesn’t concern you, just move on.”
This is emotional neglect. It is a parent wanting the child to be okay, regardless of the obvious deceit around them. It is also the parent prioritizing their own needs over the health of their relationship with their child.
An Emotional Immature parent, even the betrayed parent, will also manipulate, but slightly differently. They would be more likely to say something like, “I really need you to talk with your dad for me, because I just don’t have the energy right now. Can you please help me out with this?”
Emotionally immature parents are more likely to treat the adolescent or young adult child as a friend, in an effort elicit sympathy or pity from their child. Again, the result is emotional neglect, with the child learning that their feelings are not as important as their parents’.
Feeling Caught
Some of the research on the effects of a parent's infidelity on the kids looks at the aspect of feeling caught. Feeling caught is defined as feeling a loyalty conflict between parents, and is also understood as triangulation, or being stuck in the middle of your parents.
Both instances of the emotional manipulation I described above help a child to feel more caught between their parents.
While being caught feels bad, because you are constantly trying to help your parents at the expense of yourself, the sad reality is that kids who grow up in this role will start to feel comfortable in it. It may be their only experience of feeling any emotional connection to their parents at all. So even into adulthood, they may cling to this role in their family because they intuit that if they get out of it, they may be left with no emotional connection at all.
The Role of Secrets
A child who discovers a parent’s affair will almost always have to cope with the burden of secrets. Either because the child discovers the secret and doesn’t know who else knows, or, even if the affair is out in the open, the child will need to decide who in their world to trust with the information.
As I explain in this blog post, keeping a secret literally puts your brain at war with itself.
One way that emotionally immature parents avoid accountability is by keeping secrets. The affair may be the big secret, but often when the adult child starts to examine their family’s patterns more deeply, many smaller secrets or half-truths start to emerge. It’s common for families that experience infidelity to be steeped in secrets, often for generations.
The Extra Challenge with Setting Boundaries
Setting boundaries with parents who cheat is similar to setting boundaries with emotionally immature parents. Briefly, it comes down to choosing a simple boundary, stating it clearly, reinforcing how this boundary will benefit your parent, and then holding the boundary over and over and over again. For a more detailed description of this process, check out this post.
I love this method because it is simple and it works (I have used it myself multiple times). But here is a unique challenge for kids of cheating parents.
One of the biggest complaints I hear from the people I have interviewed have is that they feel they cannot be authentic with their parents. They cannot be their true selves. While the strategy for setting boundaries that I describe works, it requires that you treat your parents like toddlers.
Which may well push your buttons for three reasons:
It reverses the hierarchy, in much the same way that feeling caught does. You, as the child, are expected to be the adult. If you have spent your life trying to be the parent to your parents, having to treat them like toddlers to get your needs may just infuriate you.
It means, by definition, that you are not being authentic with your parents. You are not being your whole self the way you would never be your whole self with your three year old.
This may be compounded if you are still dealing with secrecy around the affair. One of the difficult hallmarks of being an adult child with cheating parents is constantly having to monitor who you tell what. Constantly having to manage what you say. This way of setting boundaries can feel like just another example of having to manage what you say to whom.
Craving Authenticity
Kids who grow up with cheating parents crave authenticity, especially from their family. The research on parent infidelity echoes this: cheating parents have vastly improved relationships with their children if they own up to their behavior and sincerely apologize for it.
Emotionally Immature Parents simply do not have that skill. People who willfully emotionally neglect others do not have it either.
True healing from a parent’s affair may well mean recognizing that you will never receive an apology for the lies, the emotional manipulation, the feeling caught, or keeping secrets.
The good news is that no one needs to give your permission to live authentically. As an adult, you have the power to decide what you say, who you prioritize, and how you live your life.
Does any of this resonate with you? Please leave a comment or send me a note. I’d love to hear your story.