“If I Can’t Trust My Parent, Who Can I Trust?”

What do you think about this:

The fact that my father, this man that I had put on a huge pedestal, cheated on my mother, a strong independent woman, has taken a huge toll on me. I no longer trust men at all. I have lost faith in my own child’s father. Although he says he loves me, I do not trust him, or any man for that matter.
- female survey respondent in her early 20s

My mother’s affairs have given me great resentment towards women in general. I feel men always get blamed for being dogs but my experience is women are far more deceiving.
- male survey respondent in his early 30s


"... When one parent sexually betrays the other, a child’s inner world and sense of the world at large are shattered. The personal environment in which he lives and from which he draws his sense of safety and security, namely his family, is fundamentally changed because the most important people in that environment have become unrecognizable. The image of a mother or father who has sex with someone other than their spouse clashes with a child’s or adult child’s notion of what it means to be a husband or wife, and a parent. When this happens, the cheating parent can seem like a stranger, someone the child thought he knew but now discovers he doesn’t. The parent is now seen as someone whose previous identity, before the cheating was discovered, was based on lies. "


If a child can’t trust that his parent is not a liar and will always be the person he purports to be, how can he trust that anyone else with whom he comes in contact is telling the truth? Given such doubts, children of infidelity may approach every personal interaction as suspect.
When a father or mother has been caught in such a monumental lie, how can the child trust anything parents say or do? And in a broader sense, how can kids trust any grown up, who might only be pretending to live by the rules? "