So how old does the kid have to be before you tell it about the affair?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Or it’s, “use your kid as your psychiatrist.” I can’t remember not knowing my dad had affairs behind my dad’s back. I also can’t remember not knowing the story of how he dumped her for his secretary, who later turned out to be a total nutjob and ran off.

I really wish I hadn’t known any of it. It didn’t make me think any better of my mom or even any worse of my dad. Unfortunately for mom, using her daughter that way from a very early age backfired in a major way. From a very early age, it was pretty apparent who the adult was, and neither my sister nor I felt it was her. I still remember hiding under the table when she’d get in a certain mood so I wouldn’t have to listen to stories about my dad. They always wound up with her sobbing hysterically and me holding her telling her she was great.

I’ve had some moments in front of my son that I’m less than proud of, but flipping out in front of your kids or using them as a sounding board for your problems is a self indulgence. Everything shouldn’t be sunshine and roses - they’ll never learn how to argue constructively or manage emotional pain if they’re shielded from all disagreements or sadness - but, in my experience anyway, you can’t do them any good by telling them that one spouse was screwing around on the other.

42

What benefit is there to telling your kid about an affair?

A simple “Mom and Dad are going through a rough patch” oughta be a sufficient explanation if there are concerns about fights or tension around the dinner table… giving additional detail isn’t going to make the kid feel any better about what’s going on.

For the record, my parents got divorced when I was 22. My mother apparently felt that I was old enough to know everything, which means I know way more about my parents’ sex life (or lack thereof) than I ought to.

Believe me, there has been no benefit to me knowing my father had a mistress on the side and probably caught VD from her because he came home with a rash on his nether regions fifteen years ago. I’m sure it helped my mom an awful lot to be able to vent her rage, but it’s really harmed my relationship with her because talking to her is like walking through a minefield of parental TMI - even ten years after the fact.

43

I don’t really see the benefit either, but this is apparently not uncommon behavior. I personally know of people doing this, and if this thread means anything, people just kind of *do *this, even though it’s generally agreed upon that it is quite fucked up.

44

So, I’m about 24 years old, working at a company which also employs my Dad’s best friend from my childhood. DBF and I work in different sections of the company, but see each other at weekly staff meetings.

One week he happily announces that he’s hired FormerSecretary who worked with him and TruCelt’s Dad years ago. Everybody is happy as the position needed desperately to be filled.

Then he sees the look on my face, has a moment of shock and excuses himself from the room. This is the woman who not only had an affair with my Dad, she went so far as openly dirty dancing with my father at the company Christmas party. (Don’t imagine that she gets more blame than he does, but she clearly knew that was his WIFE standing ten feet away.)

Yeah, it was pleasant. Especially fun was refusing to shake her hand the day she arrived. Sorry, I just don’t have to be that big of a person.

I’m glad that I knew, it explained a great many things. Neither of my parents were particularly moral people, although they both represented themselves to be. Knowing gave me the ability to understand and make decisions about which of their morals/beliefs I wanted to emulate, and which I didn’t. It gave me the truth about my parent’s character, and an understanding about why they lived such unhappy lives. Their pursuit of mere physical sensations destroyed the happiness of all of us.

And that, I think, is the key to why it matters. Kids know something is “off” but they don’t know what. They knwo there is unhappiness floating around the house, but they don’t have the right information to process it, and make very poor guesses. Often they think it is their own fault the family isn’t happier.

I don’t think a parent who has acted badly and betrayed their family* has the right to continue under the unabated esteem of their children. They deserve to apologize, atone, and be forgiven, but not to continue as if nothing has happened.

*Yes, I see it as a huge frickin’ risk to take with the happiness of everyone in the family, for a little physical romp. Disgusting.

45

I’m 34. If either of my parents is having or has ever had an affair, I do NOT want to know about it. That holds whether they get divorced or not, or whether my sister is actually my full sister or not.

46

A voice of dissent. Finally!

Why? Why should you have to confess all your sins to your children? What types of behavior that are destructive to the marriage should be shared? If one spouse is an epic bitch who constantly puts down the other, which makes the marriage near unbearable, should this be confessed? I suppose one should say to little Timmy, “Your mother/father is incredibly vile to me, and puts me down and calls me name. It is making us miserable, and is taking a toll on our marriage” Or is infidelity the only thing that needs to be shared with the kids?

47

Well, I think if it’s upsetting the marriage, then yes. But if it happened when the kid was too young to really be aware or before they were born, then no. As MeanOldLady said, do you confess all your sins to your kids? If you neglected your wife/husband, is that a sin to confess? I mean, yeah, there are some things that you may need to confess. But I don’t think an affair necessarily falls into one. I never noticed anything amiss when my parents were growing up. What good would it do for me to learn about it now?

48

I’m going for “whatever age one parent decides to leave for the latest squeeze.” Otherwise, I don’t see that telling kids all the gory details is helpful to anybody. God knows I wish my mom hadn’t told me about Dad’s affair when I was a teenager, if only because she then started telling me about how she first got suspicious because of various changes in their sex life. Mainly, though, it’s because a significant part of me hated him for it for years after that and if I’m 100% honest with myself, a tiny part of me still kind of does. And it’s not like my respect for her shot into the stratosphere for trying to make a 15-year-old kid her sexual confidante. She wouldn’t have wanted to hear or talk about her parents’ sex life, ffs.

I knew they were having problems related to him working out of town all the time and almost never being home. That was all I needed to know, frankly. Kids need to know that you’re not getting along very well right now, but it’s nothing to do with them, and that’s all they really need (or usually want) to know.

49

Truly unimportant nitpick…

I think you are thinking of the younger brother, Maxon. The older, Charles, committed suicide in 1994.

50

Was Maxon the one who sat on a bed of nails and admitted to groping women?

51

Yep - at least the bed of nails thing ( I don’t doubt the gropings, I just don’t recall ). He was also the one who would do the old fakir trick of swallowing one end of a long strip of cloth and have the other end exiting the anus, while there was still some unswallowed. Good for cleansing the old GI tract, doncha know :rolleyes:.

His older brother Charles may have technically been crazier ( out and out schizophrenic ), but he came off as rather less…nutty, if you get my meaning. A talented, intelligent, seemingly gentle guy, who was just very ill.

52

During my early twenties my father had an affair which my mother knew about and initially tolerated (unwillingly) but which eventually resulted in their divorce.

As I was living away from home, I generally spent time with them together and I assumed the hugely tense atmosphere and my mother’s general demeanour of fury and misery was because she was angry with me. For this reason it would have been useful to know that they weren’t getting on and that I wasn’t the problem.

However, I really did not need to hear all the detail she wanted to tell me about the affair and the break up on the pretext of “I just think you should know what he’s done”. Her expectation that I would take her side and listen to her accounts of what a bastard he was hugely damaged our relationship and it has taken a long, long time to rebuild.