192. It’s Over… Now How Do You Tell the Kids After an Affair?

When a relationship ends after an affair, the pain is already heavy enough. But when children are involved, it can feel impossible to know what to say, how much to share, and how to protect them from the fallout.

As a betrayed partner, you may feel the pull to explain, defend, justify, or finally tell the truth as you see it. But your child is not looking for the full history of the relationship. They are trying to understand one thing: what does this mean for me?

Inside this episode, I explore how to talk to your children when separation is happening after infidelity, why clarity matters more than detail, and how to reduce uncertainty without placing your child in the middle.

Key Takeaways:

• Focus on safety, not explanation. Your child does not need the full story of the affair; they need to know their world is still secure.

• Reduce uncertainty where you can. Children cope better with sadness than ongoing confusion, so give them clear, practical information about what is changing and what is not.

• Avoid creating loyalty conflict. Even subtle comments, tones, or explanations can make children feel they have to choose sides.

• Remember that teenagers are not mini adults. They may understand more intellectually, but they still should not carry the emotional weight of the relationship breakdown.

• Your role continues after the conversation. Stability comes from repeated reassurance, emotional availability, and consistent behaviour over time.

How Do You Tell the Kids After an Affair Without Overexplaining?

One of the hardest parts of separation after infidelity is knowing where truth ends, and detail begins.

You may feel tempted to explain everything. That instinct is human. But children are not asking the same questions adults ask.

They are not usually wondering who was right, who was wrong, or what happened behind closed doors. They are wondering where they will live. They are wondering whether they will still see both parents. They are wondering whether their world is still safe.

So, when asking, “How do you tell the kids after an affair?”, the goal is not full disclosure. The goal is emotional safety.

This means giving enough truth to reduce confusion, without offering details they cannot carry. A simple explanation is often more protective than a complicated one. You might say, “We have not been able to fix some problems between us.” That is honest, contained, and age-appropriate.

Children can process sadness when they feel supported. What they struggle with most is uncertainty.

How Do You Avoid Loyalty Conflict?

Loyalty conflict can happen quietly, even when no parent intends to create it.

• It may show up as a child feeling guilty for enjoying one parent.

• It may appear as avoiding certain questions.

• It can also look like trying to comfort one parent emotionally.

This often happens when children receive too much adult information. They may hear blame, tension, or subtle criticism. Then they start forming conclusions without the full picture.

Your child does not need to become a witness, judge, therapist, or messenger. They need permission to love both parents without feeling disloyal.

1. Keep the message steady, simple, and focused on their world.

2. Tell them what will change.

3. Tell them what will stay the same.

4. Reassure them that their feelings are allowed.

You cannot make this painless. But you can make it safer.

💬 Reflection Questions:

If you have had to speak to your children about separation, divorce, or infidelity, what felt hardest: knowing what to say, managing your own emotions, or worrying about the impact on them?

People Also Ask

What to tell kids after an affair?

Tell them the truth without the details. Focus on what changes, what stays stable, and that they are loved by both of you. They don’t need blame. They need safety, clarity, and permission to feel whatever comes up.

What is the 3-3-3 rule for kids?

The 3-3-3 rule helps children manage anxiety. Ask them to name 3 things they see, 3 things they hear, and move 3 body parts. It brings them back to the present, where safety feels easier to access.

Should I tell my children I had an affair?

Only share what helps them feel safe, not what eases your guilt. Children need truth without adult detail. Focus on the separation, their stability, and reassurance that they are loved and not responsible.

How will my children be affected by my affair?

Children may feel confused, anxious, angry, or withdrawn, especially if routines change. What matters most is reducing uncertainty, avoiding blame, and providing steady love, honesty, and emotional safety.

Connect with Luke:

• Website: www.lifecoachluke.com

• Instagram: @mylifecoachluke

• Email: luke@lifecoachluke.com

Join the After the Affair community at www.facebook.com/groups/aftertheaffaircommunity

Episode Transcript:

The After The Affair podcast with me Luke Shillings is here to help you process, decide and move forward on purpose following infidelity. Together we'll explore what's required to rebuild trust not only in yourself but also with others. Whether you stay or leave I can help and no matter what your story there will be something here for you.

Let's go! Hello and welcome back to the After The Affair podcast I'm your host Luke Shillings and today you're listening to episode number 192. In the last episode we explored the question of whether to tell your children about an affair at all. We looked at the difference between truth and detail, when to say something and what children actually need to hear in order to feel safe.

Today I want to move into a situation more specific and that is often a little harder to navigate because this is where things are no longer uncertain or contained, this is where something has already changed, this is where the relationship is ending, where separation is happening, where there is going to be a visible shift in your child's world, not something that they might sense but something they will live inside and that changes the nature of the conversation entirely. In the previous episode the conversation was about awareness, about whether to bring your child into something that they may not fully see or understand yet but when the relationship is ending they're already in it, they are already picking up on the changes, they're already sensing the shift in tone, energy, behaviour and interaction, even if nothing is actually being said directly and so the question moves from should we tell them to something more immediate, how do we help them understand what is actually happening to them? Because that is what this is, from their perspective this is not about a relationship breakdown, it's about their world changing. Before we even get into what to say it is worth spending plenty of time on what is happening inside you as a parent because this is where most of the difficulty comes from.

The work I do in my one-to-one coaching is with the parents not the children. There is often a very specific kind of pressure that builds in this situation. It is not just sadness or uncertainty, it is responsibility.

A sense that what you say next matters in a way that feels permanent. You might notice thoughts like am I about to change their life forever? Are they going to look back on this moment one day? Am I responsible for the impact it has on them? Is there a way to do this without hurting them? And underneath all of that there is often guilt. Even in situations where logically you know the relationship wasn't working, even when you know that staying may have been far more damaging long-term, even when you know that this outcome is necessary.

Emotionally it can still feel like you're the one delivering something difficult into your child's life and that creates a very strong instinct. First to protect, second to justify. When something feels heavy we naturally want to explain it.

We want to give context. We want to make it make sense. We want to soften it by helping the other person understand why it is happening.

So the mind goes to if they understand maybe it won't hurt as much. If I explain it properly maybe they will accept it. If they see the full picture maybe they won't blame me.

This is a very human instinct but it is not aligned with what your child actually needs because your child is not trying to evaluate whether this decision makes sense. They are not assessing whether it is justified. They are not looking at the relationship and deciding if it should have continued.

They are trying to understand something much more immediate. When a child hears that their parents are separating their focus is not on the past. It is on the present and the future.

They are not thinking what happened between you. They are thinking what does this mean for me. That shows up in very simple but very practical questions like where will I live? Will I see you both? Is my routine going to change? Is anything else going to change? Is my world still stable? Am I still safe? These questions are not always asked directly of course but they are present underneath everything.

If those questions are not answered the mind fills the gaps. There is an important distinction here that is worth understanding. Children can process pain.

They can feel sad. They can feel confused. They can even feel upset as long as that experience is held within a stable environment.

What is much harder for them to process is uncertainty because uncertainty creates ongoing anxiety. It creates a loop where the mind keeps trying to figure out what is happening. Trying to predict what comes next.

Trying to make sense of something without enough information. So the goal of this conversation is not to remove the pain. That just isn't possible.

The goal is to reduce uncertainty. This is where things can start to go wrong however even with good intentions because when you try to explain why the relationship is ending you often introduce complexity. You introduce details about behaviour, history and emotional dynamics.

You might talk about how long things have been difficult or you might talk about what went wrong. You might talk about trust, connection or incompatibility and all of that is probably true but it's not useful for your child because now they are trying to process something that they do not have a framework to understand. They are trying to organise information that doesn't belong to them and in doing that they start to form conclusions.

This leads into something that is very important to avoid. Loyalty conflict. This is not always obvious.

It does not always look like being asked to choose between parents. It can often be much more subtle. It can look like feeling guilty for enjoying time with one parent.

Feeling like that they shouldn't ask certain questions. Trying to support one parent emotionally more than the other. Avoiding certain topics because they feel loaded.

Trying to understand who is right or who is wrong and the difficult part is that this can develop without anybody intending it. All it takes is small cues, a shift in tone, a comment that carries weight, an explanation that introduces blame and suddenly the child starts organising their emotional world around that information. I remember hearing my children come to me with things that they'd maybe overheard their mother talk about either with one of her friends or another family member and because they just picked up these little snippets of information and didn't have the full picture or it was out of context they then seemed to find it within themselves to fill in those gaps and bring it to me in some sense.

And it's that lack of clarity around what it is that our child actually needs to hear and how we want to treat our children during this process that I think is hugely important. And of course don't get me wrong you know I didn't have this podcast of me talking about it so clearly to myself at the time so it's easy to to not notice the impact that the things you say have on your kids. So let's just I want to just take a brief pause here and just acknowledge that this isn't easy and you won't do it perfectly and that's okay.

It's about the awareness which is what we looked at predominantly in the last episode but it's about noticing when the words that you say can impact your children in ways that perhaps you hadn't considered. So if you're not focussing on explaining the past then where do you bring clarity? Well you bring clarity to their world, to what they're going to experience, to what is not changing, to what they can rely on. This is where specificity really does help.

You can say you're still going to go to the same school, you're still going to see both of us, we're going to make sure you're taken care of, we are both still here for you, we both still love you. This kind of clarity produces uncertainty, it gives them something to hold on to, something stable. Now it's inevitable that at some point they will ask why and obviously that is natural.

They're trying to understand what's going on and why it's happened and this is where it can feel really quite difficult from time to time because there is often a strong pull to answer fully in the same way that you might answer to your friend or your therapist or your coach. You know, the desire to say exactly what happened, to finally express what has been going on that you've been holding in all of that time. The amount of times that you've gone into the other room to cry or you've held something back in a moment, you bit your lip when you've been so frustrated at your partner and tried to hide it from your children and even though they've not known exactly what's going on they've probably been able to sense that something wasn't right, there's a disconnect, mummy and daddy aren't talking to each other the same way that they used to.

But this is where restraint does matter because once you open that level of detail you cannot control how it is interpreted. A more contained response is probably we weren't able to fix some of the problems between us. That's true, it's simple and it does not introduce unnecessary detail and it keeps the focus exactly where it needs to be.

Age does influence how much detail a child can understand, I think I did touch on this briefly last episode, but it does not change the core principle. Even older children who can at least intellectually understand more do not need to carry the emotional weight of the relationship. I work with many people whose parents split up during their teen years and it can be an extremely challenging time for the teenagers and have a long-lasting impact on their life, often because of the way it was dealt with.

There's this phase during those particular years, I'm thinking my daughter's a teenager now and it's easy to forget that she's not an adult because some conversations I can have with her are literally like I'm having a conversation with an adult. It's no different. And then there are these other moments where it's very clear her maturity and her awareness and her intellect and her emotional understanding are not like that of an adult.

So when you have teenage children it's very easy to imagine that they understand and can make sense of more than they really can and sometimes you can treat them like mini adults, particularly if you already have a close relationship with one of your children. And this is often the case, there's often one child that's maybe slightly more close to their father and another one that's perhaps slightly more close to their mother. Of course this is only a very loose example but it's something I've seen quite consistently across the board.

So it's important to notice what alliances are being formed, even if subtly, because our children can mask the idea of fully grown adult understanding. But that's not the place for them here. They still need clarity about their world, they still need reassurance, they still need stability.

The difference is in how you communicate, not in how much you reveal. Another layer that often comes up is when parents are not necessarily aligned. One parent might want to be more open and share more, the other parent might want to keep things contained.

This can sometimes be because of the roles they played in regards to the infidelity, whether they are the betrayed or the unfaithful, or it could be just about their personality types and how they deal with things in general. And this can create really mixed messages for the children, different tones, different explanations, and children pick up on that really quickly. So alignment does matter, not in terms of agreeing every single detail of course, but in terms of the shared intention, which ultimately is to protect the child's emotional experience.

Children respond in different ways. Some will cry, some will ask questions, some will withdraw, some will appear completely unaffected. And that last one can be really confusing because it can feel like that they either don't care or they're just so disconnected from things, but often it's just how they process.

It may show up later, sometimes it can show up days later, sometimes weeks later, occasionally even longer than that. And that can appear through behaviour, mood, habits, questions, all manner of things. So it's just something to be mindful of.

Your role does not end with the conversation though. In many ways it begins there, because what shapes your child is not what you say once, it's what they experience repeatedly. Think about trust.

You know, we've spoken about trust a lot on this podcast and a lot of that comes with consistent positive behaviour. It's about predictability and emotional availability. It's these things that really create that sense of stability.

Now as you've been listening to this there's a good chance a part of you has been thinking, okay I understand this, I understand what not to do, I understand what matters, but what do I actually say? And that's a very fair question, because this is where most people feel ultimately the most pressure. Not just in understanding the principles, but in sitting in front of your child and finding the words in that moment. Knowing how to respond when they ask you something difficult, knowing how to handle silence, knowing how to answer a question that catches you off guard.

And the reason I haven't gone fully into that in this episode is, well, intentional, because without everything we've just covered the how becomes dangerous. It becomes scripts without context, words without grounding, responses that might sound right but land completely wrong. And this is where people often get themselves into trouble.

They look for the perfect thing to say without first understanding what their child actually needs, what their role is in that moment, and what they're trying to avoid creating. So in the next episode that's exactly where we're going to go. We're going to slow this right down and look at how to structure the conversation, what to say at the beginning, how to respond to difficult questions, what to do when you feel like you said the wrong thing, oh and how to handle the moments that you can't prepare for, because they will happen.

Because there is a way to approach this that feels more grounded, more contained, more intentional. But for now, everything we've covered today gives you the foundation for that. Because once you understand that it's about safety, not explanation, that clarity matters way more than the detail.

And that your presence matters far more than your words. Then the how, well, it just becomes much clearer. So we'll go deeper into that next time.

But for now I want you to sit with what we've explored here. So if you're facing this conversation it is worth holding on to this. You're not responsible for making the situation painless.

That's not your job. You are responsible for how it is held, how it's framed, how safe your child feels within it. And that comes from how you show up.

Not how perfectly you explain it, but just how you be in and around that discomfort yourself. And that's your work to do, not your child's. And if you're navigating this and feeling unsure about how to approach it, what to say or how to support your children through it, you don't have to do this alone.

This is not just about having one conversation, it's about how you show up across the entire process. Which isn't just about your kids of course, it's about you. And that's exactly the kind of work we focus on in coaching and inside the After the Affair Collective.

If you'd like more support with that you can find out more information at lifecoachloop.com or you can come and join me over Instagram at my lifecoachloop. As always thank you so much for being here. I look forward to speaking to you again next week.

Take care. I'll talk to you soon.