Anonymous wrote:Because I want nothing to damage my kid’s relationship with my ex.

I don't understand why your need to help your ex trumps your own relationship with your kids and your own relationship with yourself. Why do you keep needing to help your ex? If the kids see him/her on their own and you made the divorce not about them what difference does it make? I really don't understand how hiding something someone did helps anyone. This is where we differ. If we really want our children to accept us as who we are and accept themselves as who they are, we have to actually be who we are.

For little kids sure they don't get all this stuff but for older kids close to 18 or slightly older and now adults I don't understand why you wouldn't want to be truthful.

For one a lot of these issues are genetic and so they will have to watch out for their own predisposition

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Anonymous wrote:I’m the poster whose DH learned about his father’s affair from a middle school bully in the middle of the cafeteria. I have a question for those of you who believe in not telling kids: do you think how he learned (which was painful and traumatic) is preferable to a quiet conversation with a loving parent?? I cannot understand that world view whatsoever. It seems phenomenally cruel.

The pp who did it at the psychologist did the right thing.

Loving parent or not, it's difficult to have a "quiet' conversation when you are angry, hurt , betrayed and bitter( and rightfully so if your spouse cheated on you and destroyed your mutual vision for the family).

And people really overlook the selfishness of cheaters. While the non- cheating spouse is telling the child what happened, the cheater will tell a very different story to defend themselves. If they are capable of cheating and all the lying and gaslighting thst comes with it, they are more than capable of trying to defend themselves to the children. This too will be cruel and confusing to the child.

With both parents and a professional present, an appropriate conversation is more likely to happen.

Sure, tell them with a psychologist, but you are still recommending telling them. What I am wondering about is the view of the people in favor of hiding affairs. Do those people think it is better to learn about cheating from a middle school bully or proactively from parents or in a therapist’s office? Because my impression of the “never tell” people is that they actually think it’s better for a child to learn from his middle school bully than to hear it proactively, which I find astonishing.

I think you are misunderstanding their opinion. They are not necessarily in favor of hiding affairs. They think that the chances of messing up in the process of telling the kids is much higher than the chances of the kid being messed up by finding out elsewhere.

You might disagree with their assessment, but claiming that they are in favor of hiding affairs is an misunderstanding of their position.

I don' t tell my kids about my sex life with their dad. It dies not mean that DH and I are hiding our sex lives. It's just not an appropriate conversation to have with them.

Okay, but that still doesn’t answer my question, which I think the pro-not-telling contingent is avoiding at this point: for those of you who do not think that children should be proactively told about the truth of parental affairs: do you think that it was better for my DH to learn about his father’s affair from a bully in the middle school cafeteria as opposed to proactively learning the truth from his parents or in a therapist’s office?

Because my impression from the not-telling posters is that hiding the affair — and I’m really not sure what else it is if you are not telling the kids what happened — is more important than protecting the kids from learning about the truth of the affair in ways like my DH did. I find that viewpoint unfathomable. I cannot imagine, seeing the fallout my DH went through, leaving a child unprotected that way. It is incomprehensible to me.

I have specifically said if you feel like there is a more than likely scenario where a kid will be told in an environment like school (because of the players involved or the scope of people in the middle of the conflict) then you should find a healthy and safe way to proactively tell them, with the help of a therapist and if possible the cheating spouse telling them not the other spouse because then it becomes about the cheating spouse confessing to the kid what they did and it is between the two of them. It doesn't place the kid in a position of choosing sides in a conflict, it becomes a conflict between the kid and the cheating spouse directly. But if the middle school bully knows then one or both parents are running their mouths, and THAT is not what any of us are suggesting. Don't tell your kid but do spread it all over town is not what anyone is advocating. The parents know if it is OUT THERE or not, or they should.

But I would also challenge you and your DH to think more critically about what happened to him. Because what most people are saying is that you should tell your kids what they need to know in a healthy way that is focused on THEIR continuing to believe that their life is stable, that their parents love them, that they know what to expect etc. I think situations like your DH it is likely not THAT but parents failing on these other marks and then the finding out in a bad way is just a symptom of other bad things happening.

So like, keeping it from a kid, then having mom talk about it all over town until everyone knows, then continuing not to tell the kid knowing they will be humiliated, and then not admitting it when they are humiliated and ask about it. The crime there was not neglecting to proactively tell the kid on day 1. The crime there is not assessing the kid's experience of the situation, not keeping it within an appropriate circle, not understanding when it escaped that circle, not then proactively telling the kid to protect them from that.

You are making it all about the first decision when in reality it is about a LOT of bad decisions, all of which point to bad parenting.

Sure, I’m not going to disagree that there was a full cluster of bad parenting from my cheating FIL (not from my MIL). Among other bad decisions, he asked my MIL not to tell the kids (using the reasoning the don’t-tell people here have promoted) and she agreed, which she of course deeply regretted after my poor DH came home from that day in the cafeteria. My DH was (as a teen) angry with her for not telling him the truth, and it took years for him to realize the awful position her DH had put her in. She thought she was doing the right thing and didn’t know that FIL had been open about the affair in their social circles.

And really, that’s the thing I don’t get here. You seem to think that cheaters are sober, good decision-makers who make good parenting decisions for the benefit of their kids. That really doesn’t track at all with my experience. In my experience, I’ve yet to see a cheater who put their kids first. And the kids know it. They know their mom or dad doesn’t really care about them. Certainly my DH knew that. And so I’m extremely skeptical that cheating parents can somehow cheat yet also be a caring advocate for their kids and be able to soberly assess whether their kids will learn about the truth of the affair in situations like the one my DH endured. I just don’t see cheaters suddenly becoming the kind of parent who care about protecting their kids from harm, when there is concrete evidence that they are pretty delusional. Maybe there are cheaters out there that can soberly assess whether their kids are more likely to be hurt by being told by their parents or not, but when I look around at the cheating parents I’ve known, they are pretty universally incapable of that level of self-reflection.

And I would assume your DH correctly holds his dad accountable then? Not his mom? It took awhile but he got there. There was no avoiding the terrible conclusion that his dad sucks. But he got there because of things his dad did to HIM. He didn't have to get there by feeling like he took his mom's side over his dad's because she wanted him to.

And regardless of how he feels about it now, he cannot actually speak to the inverse situation where the mom in that case tells the kid and hates the dad and the kid lives with the specter of hate and discord and feeling like they are a pawn in a war. Lots of us are speaking to that being just as crappy.

Just because you have yet to see a cheater put their kids first doesn't mean they don't exist. I have a friend who cheated on her husband for a lot of bad reasons. They did therapy, stayed together, have three wonderful kids and I can't speak to their marriage honestly but she is a WONDERFUL mother. You are using a really narrow personal experience to extrapolate something about all cheaters. Just like every other kind of person there is a LOT of people on that spectrum. And they are not all terrible people and they are not all terrible parents.

Basically my entire position is that the needs of the kids need to be paramount and parents need to soberly evaluate the situation and make decisions based on the kid's need not their own. There are situations where that means telling them, and situations where that means not telling them. IMO I will continue to believe that if they CAN be protected from that, they should be.

I agree with you on the bolded, but I disagree that in general the default rule should be to not tell, largely because I simply don’t think it’s realistic if you want to protect your kids from being told by someone who wants to hurt them (like the middle school bully). The cheating happened. Unless it was kept deeply secret such that only the cheater, the AP, and the ex will ever know (unusual), the kids will eventually find out. It’s only a question of when and how, and I think it’s delusional to pretend otherwise.

I am also skeptical that cheating parents are capable of the bolded, generally speaking. You are basing your idea of the “good cheater” on your one friend, but that’s a pretty narrow and IMO unusual situation. Certainly that doesn’t track my lived experience (not just my FIL) nor that of most people I know.

My DH had a good relationship with his mom eventually, but it was harmed for years because he felt she had deceived him (which she had, to be blunt). Of course finding out the way he did was traumatic and he (as a hurt teen) lashed out at both parents, not just the one who was really at fault.

I am one of the pps you are responding to above. There are at least two of us. lol

You argue that PP is basing their response on the one "good cheater" then let me add my dad as the second.

My dad was a wonderful father. He was arguably the best in our entire extended family on both sides. He was very involved in our activities: school, playing, emotional development, etc.

But he was an awful husband. My mother told us about some of the stuff he had done, and we confronted him. He had his own version of the story. We never took sides, but we never thought that he was wrong and she was right. I only came to that realization as a young adult. My siblings came to it much later. We did not have the capacity to process some of things. It just felt like two broken human beings bickering and telling on each other.

So there is no way that I am assuming that all cheaters are bad parents. And my parents loved us more than anything in the world. And my dad cheating or being a horrible husband does not change that.

It’s only on DCUM that I’ve ever encountered this phenomenon of cheaters who are excellent parents. I’ve literally never encountered one in my real life. I personally don’t think they actually exist. The cheating parents I’ve know have universally been pretty terrible parents.

You do not know everyone who cheats. Many doctors are others do. Parenting has nothing to do with cheating

Uh, doctors aren’t automatically good parents. How weird.

Of course I do not know everyone who cheats. But in my life, I’ve never met a cheater who was a good parent. Shrug.

And I have never seen any correlation between a spouse who sleeps around vs their ability to parent. Most of the "cheaters" I know are in sexless marriages, so their extra marital activities in fact is what keeps the family together. Everyone in the house benefits.

Anonymous wrote:Regardless of the reason for the divorce, I simply don't understand why a one-sentence truthful answer is a problem for children. I divorced your mom because she was lying to me about purchases and draining our bank account and I couldn't get her to be truthful to me. I divorced your dad because he was an alcoholic and when he drank he became violent with me. I divorced your mom because while at work she was having an affair for years with the neighbor and is now going to marry him. I get not making the person out to be all bad and going on and on about it, but I don't understand lying or complete avoidance.

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Anonymous wrote:Regardless of the reason for the divorce, I simply don't understand why a one-sentence truthful answer is a problem for children. I divorced your mom because she was lying to me about purchases and draining our bank account and I couldn't get her to be truthful to me. I divorced your dad because he was an alcoholic and when he drank he became violent with me. I divorced your mom because while at work she was having an affair for years with the neighbor and is now going to marry him. I get not making the person out to be all bad and going on and on about it, but I don't understand lying or complete avoidance.

For little kids sure they don't get all this stuff but for older kids close to 18 or slightly older and now adults I don't understand why you wouldn't want to be truthful. For one a lot of these issues are genetic and so they will have to watch out for their own predisposition. Secondly, they should know what issues were in the marriage so they can avoid them in their own relationships. A good number of divorces happen right before or right after the kids leave the nest. I don't really feel like my kids would have given me a pass on "dad and I didn't get along" as a reason.

A 13-year old can understand that for chrissakes, especially one living in 2022 with what they see on their iPhones, Tik Tok and hear in school. Give me a break.

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Parenting has nothing to do with cheating

This isn’t accurate. A cheating parent can be diverting assets from the family, and certainly time that might otherwise be spent with kids. A cheating parent can also cause trauma to the other parent, which then impacts the kids. It also often causes destruction of the family, which certainly impacts parenting (at a bare minimum, giving the parent only 50% access to kids. This is the problem with cheaters who compartmentalize the cheating as “just sex” - it really can’t be kept in that box.

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Anonymous wrote:Regardless of the reason for the divorce, I simply don't understand why a one-sentence truthful answer is a problem for children. I divorced your mom because she was lying to me about purchases and draining our bank account and I couldn't get her to be truthful to me. I divorced your dad because he was an alcoholic and when he drank he became violent with me. I divorced your mom because while at work she was having an affair for years with the neighbor and is now going to marry him. I get not making the person out to be all bad and going on and on about it, but I don't understand lying or complete avoidance.

For little kids sure they don't get all this stuff but for older kids close to 18 or slightly older and now adults I don't understand why you wouldn't want to be truthful. For one a lot of these issues are genetic and so they will have to watch out for their own predisposition. Secondly, they should know what issues were in the marriage so they can avoid them in their own relationships. A good number of divorces happen right before or right after the kids leave the nest. I don't really feel like my kids would have given me a pass on "dad and I didn't get along" as a reason.

Anonymous wrote:Regardless of the reason for the divorce, I simply don't understand why a one-sentence truthful answer is a problem for children. I divorced your mom because she was lying to me about purchases and draining our bank account and I couldn't get her to be truthful to me. I divorced your dad because he was an alcoholic and when he drank he became violent with me. I divorced your mom because while at work she was having an affair for years with the neighbor and is now going to marry him. I get not making the person out to be all bad and going on and on about it, but I don't understand lying or complete avoidance.

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Parenting has nothing to do with cheating

This isn’t accurate. A cheating parent can be diverting assets from the family, and certainly time that might otherwise be spent with kids. A cheating parent can also cause trauma to the other parent, which then impacts the kids. It also often causes destruction of the family, which certainly impacts parenting (at a bare minimum, giving the parent only 50% access to kids. This is the problem with cheaters who compartmentalize the cheating as “just sex” - it really can’t be kept in that box.

+1 They ALWAYS begin to become overly critical to their spouse and often their kids.

The stress of the secrets and fear of getting caught also drives anger (inappropriate reaction to minor things). They will miss certain things in order to 'meet up', maybe a weekend out of town or overnights that aren't necessary.

IF it's during the work day, they will often stay later or work 'over time' to make up the time away from the office, which cuts into having dinner with the family and family time.

They will be distracted--messaging ap on vacation or talking on the way to work, etc.. Gas, hotel, little gifts, etc. all is $ diverted from family.

BUT THE BIGGEST DEAL: they almost all get caught if they keep at it long enough and the amount of trauma to the spouse and kids and family is monumental, so much more than if a 'regular' divorce was initiated without the betrayal/lies/exposure to disease and third party (and often another family betrayed spouse).

Mental gymnastics is BIG with cheaters. It's always 'benefitting the family', 'making them a better parent' blah, blah., blah. That is pure selfishness and lack of self awareness.

Anonymous wrote:

Parenting has nothing to do with cheating

This isn’t accurate. A cheating parent can be diverting assets from the family, and certainly time that might otherwise be spent with kids. A cheating parent can also cause trauma to the other parent, which then impacts the kids. It also often causes destruction of the family, which certainly impacts parenting (at a bare minimum, giving the parent only 50% access to kids. This is the problem with cheaters who compartmentalize the cheating as “just sex” - it really can’t be kept in that box.

Parenting has nothing to do with cheating

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Anonymous wrote:I’m the poster whose DH learned about his father’s affair from a middle school bully in the middle of the cafeteria. I have a question for those of you who believe in not telling kids: do you think how he learned (which was painful and traumatic) is preferable to a quiet conversation with a loving parent?? I cannot understand that world view whatsoever. It seems phenomenally cruel.

The pp who did it at the psychologist did the right thing.

Loving parent or not, it's difficult to have a "quiet' conversation when you are angry, hurt , betrayed and bitter( and rightfully so if your spouse cheated on you and destroyed your mutual vision for the family).

And people really overlook the selfishness of cheaters. While the non- cheating spouse is telling the child what happened, the cheater will tell a very different story to defend themselves. If they are capable of cheating and all the lying and gaslighting thst comes with it, they are more than capable of trying to defend themselves to the children. This too will be cruel and confusing to the child.

With both parents and a professional present, an appropriate conversation is more likely to happen.

Sure, tell them with a psychologist, but you are still recommending telling them. What I am wondering about is the view of the people in favor of hiding affairs. Do those people think it is better to learn about cheating from a middle school bully or proactively from parents or in a therapist’s office? Because my impression of the “never tell” people is that they actually think it’s better for a child to learn from his middle school bully than to hear it proactively, which I find astonishing.

I think you are misunderstanding their opinion. They are not necessarily in favor of hiding affairs. They think that the chances of messing up in the process of telling the kids is much higher than the chances of the kid being messed up by finding out elsewhere.

You might disagree with their assessment, but claiming that they are in favor of hiding affairs is an misunderstanding of their position.

I don' t tell my kids about my sex life with their dad. It dies not mean that DH and I are hiding our sex lives. It's just not an appropriate conversation to have with them.

Okay, but that still doesn’t answer my question, which I think the pro-not-telling contingent is avoiding at this point: for those of you who do not think that children should be proactively told about the truth of parental affairs: do you think that it was better for my DH to learn about his father’s affair from a bully in the middle school cafeteria as opposed to proactively learning the truth from his parents or in a therapist’s office?

Because my impression from the not-telling posters is that hiding the affair — and I’m really not sure what else it is if you are not telling the kids what happened — is more important than protecting the kids from learning about the truth of the affair in ways like my DH did. I find that viewpoint unfathomable. I cannot imagine, seeing the fallout my DH went through, leaving a child unprotected that way. It is incomprehensible to me.

I have specifically said if you feel like there is a more than likely scenario where a kid will be told in an environment like school (because of the players involved or the scope of people in the middle of the conflict) then you should find a healthy and safe way to proactively tell them, with the help of a therapist and if possible the cheating spouse telling them not the other spouse because then it becomes about the cheating spouse confessing to the kid what they did and it is between the two of them. It doesn't place the kid in a position of choosing sides in a conflict, it becomes a conflict between the kid and the cheating spouse directly. But if the middle school bully knows then one or both parents are running their mouths, and THAT is not what any of us are suggesting. Don't tell your kid but do spread it all over town is not what anyone is advocating. The parents know if it is OUT THERE or not, or they should.

But I would also challenge you and your DH to think more critically about what happened to him. Because what most people are saying is that you should tell your kids what they need to know in a healthy way that is focused on THEIR continuing to believe that their life is stable, that their parents love them, that they know what to expect etc. I think situations like your DH it is likely not THAT but parents failing on these other marks and then the finding out in a bad way is just a symptom of other bad things happening.

So like, keeping it from a kid, then having mom talk about it all over town until everyone knows, then continuing not to tell the kid knowing they will be humiliated, and then not admitting it when they are humiliated and ask about it. The crime there was not neglecting to proactively tell the kid on day 1. The crime there is not assessing the kid's experience of the situation, not keeping it within an appropriate circle, not understanding when it escaped that circle, not then proactively telling the kid to protect them from that.

You are making it all about the first decision when in reality it is about a LOT of bad decisions, all of which point to bad parenting.

Sure, I’m not going to disagree that there was a full cluster of bad parenting from my cheating FIL (not from my MIL). Among other bad decisions, he asked my MIL not to tell the kids (using the reasoning the don’t-tell people here have promoted) and she agreed, which she of course deeply regretted after my poor DH came home from that day in the cafeteria. My DH was (as a teen) angry with her for not telling him the truth, and it took years for him to realize the awful position her DH had put her in. She thought she was doing the right thing and didn’t know that FIL had been open about the affair in their social circles.

And really, that’s the thing I don’t get here. You seem to think that cheaters are sober, good decision-makers who make good parenting decisions for the benefit of their kids. That really doesn’t track at all with my experience. In my experience, I’ve yet to see a cheater who put their kids first. And the kids know it. They know their mom or dad doesn’t really care about them. Certainly my DH knew that. And so I’m extremely skeptical that cheating parents can somehow cheat yet also be a caring advocate for their kids and be able to soberly assess whether their kids will learn about the truth of the affair in situations like the one my DH endured. I just don’t see cheaters suddenly becoming the kind of parent who care about protecting their kids from harm, when there is concrete evidence that they are pretty delusional. Maybe there are cheaters out there that can soberly assess whether their kids are more likely to be hurt by being told by their parents or not, but when I look around at the cheating parents I’ve known, they are pretty universally incapable of that level of self-reflection.

And I would assume your DH correctly holds his dad accountable then? Not his mom? It took awhile but he got there. There was no avoiding the terrible conclusion that his dad sucks. But he got there because of things his dad did to HIM. He didn't have to get there by feeling like he took his mom's side over his dad's because she wanted him to.

And regardless of how he feels about it now, he cannot actually speak to the inverse situation where the mom in that case tells the kid and hates the dad and the kid lives with the specter of hate and discord and feeling like they are a pawn in a war. Lots of us are speaking to that being just as crappy.

Just because you have yet to see a cheater put their kids first doesn't mean they don't exist. I have a friend who cheated on her husband for a lot of bad reasons. They did therapy, stayed together, have three wonderful kids and I can't speak to their marriage honestly but she is a WONDERFUL mother. You are using a really narrow personal experience to extrapolate something about all cheaters. Just like every other kind of person there is a LOT of people on that spectrum. And they are not all terrible people and they are not all terrible parents.

Basically my entire position is that the needs of the kids need to be paramount and parents need to soberly evaluate the situation and make decisions based on the kid's need not their own. There are situations where that means telling them, and situations where that means not telling them. IMO I will continue to believe that if they CAN be protected from that, they should be.

I agree with you on the bolded, but I disagree that in general the default rule should be to not tell, largely because I simply don’t think it’s realistic if you want to protect your kids from being told by someone who wants to hurt them (like the middle school bully). The cheating happened. Unless it was kept deeply secret such that only the cheater, the AP, and the ex will ever know (unusual), the kids will eventually find out. It’s only a question of when and how, and I think it’s delusional to pretend otherwise.

I am also skeptical that cheating parents are capable of the bolded, generally speaking. You are basing your idea of the “good cheater” on your one friend, but that’s a pretty narrow and IMO unusual situation. Certainly that doesn’t track my lived experience (not just my FIL) nor that of most people I know.

My DH had a good relationship with his mom eventually, but it was harmed for years because he felt she had deceived him (which she had, to be blunt). Of course finding out the way he did was traumatic and he (as a hurt teen) lashed out at both parents, not just the one who was really at fault.

I am one of the pps you are responding to above. There are at least two of us. lol

You argue that PP is basing their response on the one "good cheater" then let me add my dad as the second.

My dad was a wonderful father. He was arguably the best in our entire extended family on both sides. He was very involved in our activities: school, playing, emotional development, etc.

But he was an awful husband. My mother told us about some of the stuff he had done, and we confronted him. He had his own version of the story. We never took sides, but we never thought that he was wrong and she was right. I only came to that realization as a young adult. My siblings came to it much later. We did not have the capacity to process some of things. It just felt like two broken human beings bickering and telling on each other.

So there is no way that I am assuming that all cheaters are bad parents. And my parents loved us more than anything in the world. And my dad cheating or being a horrible husband does not change that.

It’s only on DCUM that I’ve ever encountered this phenomenon of cheaters who are excellent parents. I’ve literally never encountered one in my real life. I personally don’t think they actually exist. The cheating parents I’ve know have universally been pretty terrible parents.

You do not know everyone who cheats. Many doctors are others do. Parenting has nothing to do with cheating

Uh, doctors aren’t automatically good parents. How weird.

Of course I do not know everyone who cheats. But in my life, I’ve never met a cheater who was a good parent. Shrug.

And I have never seen any correlation between a spouse who sleeps around vs their ability to parent. Most of the "cheaters" I know are in sexless marriages, so their extra marital activities in fact is what keeps the family together. Everyone in the house benefits.