The short answer: Adult children get a voice in their parents’ decision to stay after an affair, but not a vote. Their grief and anger are real and deserve to be heard. The decision to stay, repair, or separate belongs only to the couple, says Idit Sharoni, LMFT, an infidelity recovery specialist since 2013.

You decided to stay. You’re doing the bravest, most unglamorous work of your life, trying to rebuild a marriage after betrayal. And then the phone rings, and it’s your daughter, and she says, “I don’t understand how you can even look at him.” Or your son stops calling his father altogether.

You thought the hardest conversation would be with your spouse. Nobody warned you it would be with your kids.

Not every grown child finds out the same way. Some overhear a conversation they were never supposed to hear. Some hear it from another person in their life. And some are the ones who found it, the text, the receipt, the second phone. However it reaches them, the moment it does, they’re in it. And a child who’s in it almost never knows how to stay out of it.

Why This Conversation Is for Parents, Not Their Adult Children

This is the subject of Episode 93 of Relationships Uncomplicated, where I sat down with Dr. Yael Neagu, LMFT, our clinical director at Relationship Experts. I want to be clear about who this conversation is for. It’s for the parents, the two of you who are trying to heal and finding that your own children have become one more storm to survive. It isn’t a trial for your kids. Their pain is real, it matters, and we honor it. And I’m also going to tell you something almost no one will give you permission to believe. Your children get a voice in this, a real one. What they don’t get is a vote.

Key Takeaways: Adult Children After an Affair

• Adult children get a voice after an affair, but not a vote. Their grief and anger are real and deserve to be heard. The decision to stay, repair, or separate belongs only to the couple.
• Cutting off a parent as punishment is not a healthy boundary. It’s usually a reaction to pain from grown children who never learned to sit with uncertainty. Abusive situations are a different matter.
• Adult kids feel entitled to a say when the family boundary has blurred. Salvador Minuchin’s structural family model explains how enmeshment and cutoff come from the same crack, just in opposite directions.
• Telling adult children about an affair works best as a united front. Both parents speak as “we,” ideally in the same room, while the couple’s repair stays private and the parent-child repair gets its own time and space.

What Happens to Grown Children When They Find Out About an Affair?

It shakes the ground they’ve been standing on their whole lives. Dr. Yael Neagu, LMFT, calls the discovery of an affair a family earthquake, and I think that’s exactly right. An affair doesn’t only break the trust between two people. It cracks the story a whole family told itself about who they are and where they came from. Your kids were living inside that story, so when it breaks, they feel the floor move too, even the ones with their own partners, their own mortgages, and their own lives.

Why Does Saying “My Adult Children” Matter?

Dr. Neagu names what that can look like emotionally: shock, anger, betrayal, confusion, and grief, and sometimes a strong pull to protect the parent they see as hurt. She also pays close attention to the words parents use. “My kids” puts you in the role of protecting and caring for a child. “My adult children” reminds you that you’re dealing with grown people who have their own relationships, their own values, and their own feelings about what happened. It’s a small shift in language that changes how you relate to the whole situation.

Is My Child’s Reaction Grief or Something Else?

Often it’s both, and you’re allowed to see both. For a child, even a grown one, a parent’s marriage is the origin story. It’s the ground they stood on without ever knowing they were standing on it. When it cracks, something in them grieves the picture of the family they thought they came from. That grief is real.

But grief is a feeling, not a license. What your child chooses to do with that grief is a separate thing. As clinicians and as parents, we don’t deny the feelings. And we also draw a line where “I’m expressing my pain” turns into “I’m making decisions about your life.”

Why Do Adult Children See Infidelity as Black and White?

Many adult children are in their twenties and thirties, fully grown, but without much lived experience of what a long marriage actually costs and survives. They’ve been handed one clean rule by the culture around them: someone cheated, so it’s over. When you refuse to make it that clean by saying “I’m staying,” they hit a wall of discomfort they have no idea how to stand in.

Is Cutting Off a Parent a Boundary?

No. Here’s the part I won’t soften. Some adult children reach for the only tool they think they have, which is punishment. They cut you off, they ration your phone calls, they go cold and call it a boundary.

Stonewalling your parents isn’t a boundary, and it isn’t justice. When an adult child cuts off a parent to punish them for staying, that’s a reaction to pain, not a healthy boundary. It’s what people do when they can’t tolerate uncertainty and nobody ever taught them another move. It feels like power, and it quietly corrodes everything, including them. I’m not talking about abusive situations here. I’m talking about the growing number of grown children who cut off a parent because they don’t know how to be in something uncomfortable.

How Should a Parent Respond When an Adult Child Pulls Away?

So if you’re the parent reading this, hold both of these. Your kids’ feelings are real and they’re welcome, every single one of them. And cutting you off, or handing out closeness as a reward and distance as a punishment, isn’t a verdict you have to accept as fair. It’s a signal that your child is in pain and reaching for the bluntest instrument they own. You can have enormous compassion for that and still refuse to be governed by it.

How Do Adult Children React When a Parent Stays After Infidelity?

They react in different ways, and Yael walks through them on the episode. Some adult children support their parents and respect the decision to work on the marriage. This conversation is about the harder situations.

Some take sides right away. The parent who was unfaithful becomes the villain, and the hurt parent becomes the one who needs protecting. Some go further and push their parents to separate, either from that black and white rule or from the meaning they give the affair: if you cheated, you must be unhappy, so why would you stay? Some are carrying more than the news, because they’re the ones who discovered it or the ones a parent confided in, and now they feel responsible for a marriage that was never theirs to hold.

Why Would an Adult Child Pull Away From the Hurt Parent?

And some pull away completely. Yael points out something that surprises a lot of people. Sometimes an adult child cuts off the parent who was unfaithful, and sometimes they distance themselves from the hurt parent because they can’t understand or accept the decision to stay. She’s also seen adult children deliver an ultimatum: get divorced, or you won’t have a relationship with us or your grandchildren. Dr. Neagu’s insight is that enmeshment and cutoff look like opposite reactions, but they can be two expressions of the same difficulty: no healthy boundary between parent and child while the parents are in crisis.

Why Do My Adult Kids Feel Entitled to a Say in My Marriage?

Adult children feel entitled to a say when the boundary between the parents and the children has blurred. This idea comes from a brilliant family therapist named Salvador Minuchin and his structural model of the family, which therapists around the world still practice.

The family is organized into subsystems, and the two that matter here are the couple unit and the child unit. A healthy family keeps a clear hierarchy, with the parents holding the authority over the marriage decisions, and clear boundaries between the units. Trouble starts when that boundary blurs: a child gets pulled in, leaned on, parentified, or recruited to one parent’s side. Or it hardens the other way, into cutoff. The dissolving of hierarchy and boundaries is what leaves an adult child feeling entitled to a say in the marriage, and it’s also what can lead to a child cutting off one or both parents. Same crack, two directions. If you’d like to read more about the model, Psychology Today has a good overview of structural family therapy.

What’s the Difference Between Clear, Enmeshed, and Rigid Boundaries?

Minuchin also tells clear boundaries apart from enmeshed ones and rigid ones. Think back to curfew. Say you set it at 10 PM, and your child walks in at 10:30. If the boundary is enmeshed, nothing happens. If it’s rigid, the door is locked and they have to figure out how to get back in. A clear boundary sits between those two. It creates order and separates you from your children, and it also leaves room for negotiation. That’s how a child learns to be comfortable with the uncomfortable. When kids grow up without that, they become adults who don’t know what to do with uncertainty. And there aren’t many things more uncertain than a parent staying after an affair.

Do My Children Get a Say in Whether We Stay?

No. Adult children get a voice, not a vote. Your children are standing outside the house, looking in through a window. They can love what they see, they can hate it, they can bang on the glass, but they were never the ones holding the keys.

Keeping that line clear gives the whole family something. Your children get to have their own feelings and their own relationships with each of you, without being drafted into your healing as a couple. They don’t need to know the inside of your marriage to go on loving both of you. And the biggest decision of all, whether you stay or separate, stays exactly where it belongs, with the two people who are living inside the marriage.

Why Do I Feel the Need to Explain My Decision to My Kids?

Think about the last time your child demanded to know why you’re staying, and you felt that pull in your chest to explain everything so they’d finally understand and finally approve. I know that pull. It feels like love. But it’s often the boundary beginning to dissolve. You can love your child with everything you have and still keep them out of the middle of your marriage. Those aren’t opposites. They’re the same act of protection.

How Do We Heal Our Marriage and Our Relationship With Our Kids at the Same Time?

You treat them as two separate healing processes. That’s one of Dr. Yael Neagu’s most important points. There’s the couple’s repair, and there’s the parent-child repair. They’re connected, but you don’t want one to run the other.

What Does the Parent-Child Repair Look Like?

The parent-child repair needs its own time and space. Your adult children may be hurt and angry and confused, and you need to be willing to hear that, acknowledge the impact, and stay with their pain without becoming defensive. Yael also offers a gentle way to answer questions with a boundary, something like, “We struggled, and I want to respect our privacy, so that’s what I’m willing to share.” It doesn’t have to be harsh. It can be soft and warm.

Why Does the Couple’s Repair Need Privacy?

The couple’s repair needs privacy. Dr. Neagu calls it a cocoon, a protected space where the two of you can have the hard conversations, go through setbacks, and work through painful moments without managing everyone else’s opinions. To a parent in crisis that might sound selfish. It isn’t. You’re not shutting your children out of your life. You’re building one room in the house where the repair happens, with the door closed. A marriage trying to come back to life is that fragile. If you keep carrying it out into the daylight to show the kids, defend it, and explain it, you can kill the very thing you’re trying to grow.

How Much Should I Tell My Adult Children About the Affair?

The honest answer is that it depends on your family. As a general rule, you don’t have to answer every question about every detail. The graphic specifics usually pull a child deeper into a marriage that isn’t theirs to live inside, and that rarely helps anyone heal. But I won’t hand you a rule that says never explain, because that’s not how real families work. With some kids, in some situations, depending on what they already know, you’ll need to go deeper and answer the harder questions, sometimes more than once.

What Actually Helps Adult Children Heal After an Affair?

So what actually heals your kids? I’d point to two things. The first is acknowledgment and responsibility: “I hurt this family. I’m taking responsibility. I’m doing the work.” The second is just as important, and it’s a united front. Even when you answer the hardest questions, the message needs to come from us, not from me. The parental unit responds as a unit, so no child can slip between the two of you. Wherever you can, have these conversations with both of you in the room rather than one on one. The moment it becomes one parent alone with a child telling their own version, the two units have collapsed again. Together, you’re a wall your kid can lean on. Split, you’re a crack they fall straight into.

And it can be as simple as this: “We know this has been painful for the whole family, and we’re both doing the work to heal it.” That sentence is a boundary.

What If My Kids Are Pushing Us to Divorce?

Even when adult children push for divorce, the decision belongs to the two of you. Sometimes kids stop grieving and start governing. They hand down a verdict and try to cast the deciding vote. What I see happen next is almost tragic in its irony. The parents get so consumed with managing their children’s reactions that the reactions begin to run the marriage. All the energy that belonged to the repair gets spent in the courtroom instead, and you end up litigating your marriage to a jury of your own kids while the marriage itself sits there, untended, waiting.

I want to be fair to the kids here. Most of the time this is love in a clumsy costume. They’re terrified for the parent they think got hurt. But protection delivered as an ultimatum still does damage. And underneath it is a brutal math no child should ever have to do: that to love one parent, they have to turn on the other.

Why Do Adult Children See Staying as the Weak Choice?

Dr. Neagu adds the cultural piece. She points to something Esther Perel has talked about: there was a time when getting divorced was seen as shameful, and today, in some circles, there’s almost the same judgment around choosing to stay. There’s also been a shift from “if something’s broken, let’s fix it” to “if something’s broken, let’s replace it.” That doesn’t mean anyone should stay in a relationship that’s unsafe or abusive. It means your kids aren’t only reacting to your marriage. They’re carrying a whole culture that already decided staying is the weak choice.

So here’s what I need you to hold on to. Your children are allowed to be furious. They’re allowed to grieve. What they’re not entitled to is the decision. And this is the part that sets you free: they don’t have to agree with your decision in order to respect what is yours.

Where Do We Start?

Start with the two of you. Dr. Neagu’s first step is to sit down together and get clear, as a team, on how you’ll handle this with your adult children: what you’re comfortable sharing, what your boundaries are, and what you want your kids to hear from both of you. Being a team doesn’t mean you agree on everything or feel the same way about what happened. It means you agree on how you’ll respond. She thinks of it as harm reduction. You’re already in a crisis in your marriage, so be thoughtful about not creating more damage in the family. And protecting the family this way protects your own healing too.

Your children can know you’re in pain without being handed the job of fixing it. That job was never theirs. It was always yours and your partner’s, together.

FAQ:

Do adult children get a say in whether their parents stay together after an affair?

No. Adult children get a voice, not a vote. Their feelings deserve to be heard, and the decision to stay, repair, or separate belongs to the couple, the two people living inside the marriage.

Is it a healthy boundary when an adult child cuts off a parent after an affair?

Not when it’s used as punishment. Idit Sharoni, LMFT, explains that stonewalling a parent for staying isn’t a boundary or justice. It’s often what people do when they can’t tolerate uncertainty and have never learned another way to handle discomfort. This doesn’t apply to abusive situations.

Should both parents talk to their adult children together after an affair?

Wherever possible, yes. Idit Sharoni recommends a united front, where the message comes from both parents as “we” and the conversations happen with both parents in the room rather than one on one, so no child gets pulled between them.

What is Salvador Minuchin’s structural family model?

It’s the model behind structural family therapy, which sees the family as organized into subsystems, including the couple unit and the child unit. A healthy family keeps a clear hierarchy, with parents holding authority over marriage decisions, and clear boundaries between the units. When those boundaries blur, an adult child can feel entitled to a say in the marriage, or cut a parent off.

What should parents consider when telling adult children about an affair?

It depends on the family, but you don’t have to answer every question about every detail. Graphic specifics usually pull a child deeper into a marriage that isn’t theirs. What helps most is acknowledgment, responsibility, and a shared message from both parents: “We know this has been painful for the whole family, and we’re both doing the work to heal it.”

What is the It’s Okay to Stay program?

It’s Okay to Stay® is the infidelity recovery program from Relationship Experts for committed couples who want to stay and heal after betrayal. A private 45-minute consultation helps a couple find out whether it’s the right fit. Learn more about the program here.

You Don’t Have to Do This Alone – Adult Children Taking Sides After Infidelity

If you and your partner want to stay, and you’re finding that the people you love most are making that harder instead of easier, that’s exactly the work we do. You can request a private 45-minute consultation, and we’ll look at your situation together and tell you honestly whether our program, It’s Okay to Stay®, is the right fit for you. Request it at https://iditsharoni.com/45

Loving your children and protecting your marriage were never two different jobs. You can hold the door open to your kids with one hand and protect your healing with the other.