The cheap collateral damage of sex scandals

Even assuming that we all make mistakes, it never ceases to boggle the mind how men, particularly those who stake out high moral ground in politics or build a pristine image in the community as athletes, lay waste to it all in an act of passion.

Here we are, a human race that can peer billions of light years into space, communicate in a click with someone 12,000 miles away, and cure all kinds of diseases, yet cannot find the carnal off-switch. In the normal course of parenting, trust between children and fathers is a devilish ride. So why some dads go all out to be Satan is an enduring fascination.

Once, just once, could a guy like Sanford anticipate his own press clippings and decide that his “soul mate’’ in Argentina was not worth tearing a piece out of the souls of his boys? He can call his sons “absolute jewels and blessings,’’ as he did at his stranger-than-truth press conference last month, but when he later said, “I knew the cost’’ of the affair and the cost was worth it because “I will be able to die knowing that I had met my soul mate,’’ you just get the feeling he doesn’t get it. The children just end up as cheap collateral damage.

In this world where everything is permanent on the Web, how will the children of the rest of the above deal with, let alone come to terms with knowing either that dad was killed by his lover, dad made calls on prostitutes, or dad’s parents paid off mistresses?

There is a surprising paucity of university-based data on the direct effects of affairs on children, but it is easy to extrapolate that many of them will suffer forms of post-betrayal stress similar to living in a broken home; plunging performance in school, hitting the bottle, or doing drugs. Endless studies show that children are disrupted by changes in family structure, and, boy, does infidelity often change family structure.

“When a parent has an affair that is disclosed, the landscape of the family changes. It can’t be denied,’’ according to Janis Abrahms Spring, author of several books on family relationships, including extramarital affairs, and a former clinical supervisor in Yale University’s psychology department.

“There are often two losses for the child,’’ she said. “The hurt partner is often filled with anxiety and depression and is not available to the child the same way as before. The unfaithful parent is off with the affair person and not available to the child. The family blows apart.’’

Spring, who has spent three decades specializing on infidelity issues, said the seemingly nonstop stories of powerful, public men cheating on their wives in very spectacular ways, including deadly results, serves to demonstrate how affairs carry “the power of a crack-cocaine high. They don’t think clearly, they don’t think of the consequences. The attraction often is not necessarily the person they are having the affair with but how they are experiencing themselves in that relationship, which can be intoxicating.’’

With one out of every five men admitting to ever having had an extramarital affair, according to the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, we really need a fresh 12-step program for thinking with the upstairs brain before sneaking into life’s basement.

One of the nicest and human sights on the 2008 presidential campaign trail was watching Chelsea Clinton campaigning for her mother, Hillary. She demonstrates that on the surface, a daughter of the president of the United States can come out OK after her father’s affair. But we will never know the private hurt. Of the freshly-scarred 24 sons and daughters from the affairs named at the top, only time will tell which ones will rise above the hurt and which ones will be haunted forever.

Derrick Z. Jackson can be reached at jackson@globe.com.