How Couple’s Infidelity Affects Children
Adults have a big responsibility: not to allow our children to pay for our actions. In the following article, we’ll tell you how couple infidelity affects children, even if they don’t ‘know’.
How does couple infidelity affect children?
Contrary to popular belief, when a person is unfaithful to his partner, he causes a lot of damage to his family. Even when infidelity is not discovered.
This is true because children can unconsciously feel that something is going wrong at home. And when something like this happens, it negatively affects your emotional development.
Although each person is free to do what they want with their own life, when children are involved, we must be very careful with our actions, as each of them has an impact on them and their feelings.
Although we try by all means to keep them from discovering our mistakes, somehow they do. We can even identify changes in their behavior, their ability to learn or their ways of expressing themselves.
The impact of infidelity according to age
At first, a child whose father or mother is unfaithful to their partner also feels betrayed. Faced with a situation with these characteristics, children react in different ways: with anger, sadness, depression, shame or violence, among other changes in behavior.
Of course, it also depends on the child’s age and how the infidelity has affected the home. In general terms, this is how a couple’s infidelity affects children, according to the stage of life they are going through:
1. Children up to 5 years old
They may detect that their parents don’t pay as much attention as they used to and may demand more affection and affection.
If they don’t, their anxiety levels will increase, as will their feelings of insecurity, fear of abandonment, and jealousy. Uncertainty can affect them in the future and in the relationships they build.
2. Children between 5 and 10 years old
At this stage, children think they are ‘the center of the world’. So when the father or mother is unfaithful, they think it’s their fault. This feeling in relation to the parents’ posture can lead to a developmental regression as a consequence.
For example, behaviors such as wetting the bed, talking like a ‘baby’ or having problems at school may occur. Night terrors and eating disorders are also frequent at this stage.
3. Teens
During this phase, the child is likely to discover the parents’ infidelity, as he already understands the ‘outside world’. It is said that, during adolescence, this family problem affects much more than at other stages, because young people may have to act as ‘accomplices’ of the adult and not tell the other parent anything about what they know.
Also, when we are teenagers, we begin to create our personality, which will be maintained as we mature. Therefore, this betrayal of those who should help us can be harmful.
Some symptoms that may appear are: lack of self-confidence, tendency to do activities alone and reduced conversations with others.
4. Young adults
Who said that parental infidelity only affects children and teenagers? As children, there will always be repercussions if something happens to our parents, even when we no longer live with them. The reaction can be quite blunt and there may be problems re-trusting the father or mother who was unfaithful.
Finally, if you ask yourself how a couple’s infidelity affects children, you should know that no matter how old they are, their belief in love diminishes.
So much effort to explain that you should love and respect the other and then those who should be the example ‘throw it all away’ is something that will undoubtedly affect your perspective.
For children, this is the worst betrayal they can suffer and it will be very difficult for them. You will have to make peace with them and work hard to get them to trust you again after what happened. However, with time, perhaps they will understand the situation and things will return to normal.
