The Cost of Silence: What Happens When Children Keep Family Secrets

Every family has things it keeps private, and privacy is a healthy aspect of family life. It’s how we create safety. You should be able to trust that your family members won’t expose personal information or retell an embarrassing story in public. But there’s a big difference between privacy and secrets.

Family secrets are usually stories or information you’re told you must never share, or else something bad will happen. They’re often about protecting the family’s image or reputation, avoiding legal trouble, preventing divorce, or keeping children from being removed from the home. Children are frequently threatened, warned that if the secret comes out, a catastrophe will follow. Sometimes the message isn’t spoken outright; the child simply knows that disclosure would mean shame, punishment, or the collapse of the family itself.

Lucy’s Story

In seventh grade, Lucy sat down at her father’s computer to work on her English paper. Halfway through typing, a notification appeared on the screen: I miss you. I wish I could see you right now. The message was from Katherine. That wasn’t her mother’s name.

Lucy clicked, and what she saw changed her world: a year’s worth of emails between her father and Katherine, thousands of messages and photos, secret meetings, a relationship that clearly wasn’t “just friends.” Panicked, she ran to her father, desperate for an explanation.

His face stayed frozen. Instead of reassurance, he demanded to know why she was looking through his email. Then he delivered the threat: she absolutely could not tell her mother. If she did, their family would be ruined. Her mother would leave. She wouldn’t be able to stay in the house.

Terrified, Lucy carried that secret until she was 25, believing silence was the only way to hold her family together. It ruined her relationship with her father, and she maintained a safe distance from her mother, fearful that too much closeness would lead to her exposing the secret.

Why Family Secrets Hurt

Research shows that keeping family secrets damages children’s mental health, family closeness, and long-term well-being.

• Mental health impact: A longitudinal study of 278 adolescents (ages 13–18) found that keeping a family secret predicted higher depressive symptoms, lower self-concept clarity, reduced self-control, greater loneliness, and poorer relationship quality.
• Clinical patterns: Therapists consistently see that secrets about trauma, filiation, and abuse often surface during adolescence, showing up as identity confusion, acting out, or self-destructive behaviors.
• Family communication: Secrets disrupt open communication, erode trust, and create coercive dynamics. Families develop a “chilling effect,” where the fear of consequences silences disclosure and keeps distance instead of closeness.

Types of Family Secrets and Their Impact

Not all secrets function the same way. Their stigma, visibility, and the relationships they involve shape how they affect children and families:

• Stigmatizing health secrets (e.g., parental HIV): Fear of stigma leads to silence. Children often feel anxious about the future and lack crucial preparation or coping support.
• Identity secrets (e.g., hidden sexual orientation): These reduce openness, block role modeling, and create emotional distance, sometimes enforced by outside systems with devastating effects.
• Abuse and filiation secrets (e.g., incest, hidden paternity): Strongly linked to identity disturbances, acting-out in adolescence, and transgenerational trauma.
• Relational or financial secrets (e.g., infidelity, hidden debt): These undermine trust between parents, destabilize family security, and teach children to normalize secrecy and mistrust.

References

T. Frijns and C. Finkenauer, "Longitudinal associations between keeping a secret and psychosocial adjustment in adolescence," Int. J. Behav. Dev., vol. 33, no. 2, 2009. doi: 10.1177/016502540809802

N. G. Maxwell, "The Psychological Consequences of Judicially Imposed Closets in Child Custody and Visitation Cases Involving Gay or Lesbian Parents," Social Science Research Network, 2007.

T. D. Afifi, "The chilling effect in families and the pressure to conceal secrets," 2005. doi: 10.1080/03637750500111906

T. D. Afifi and S. M. Davis, "Examining family secrets from a communication perspective," in Family Secrets, 2015.

Orgad, Yariv. (2015). The culture of family secrets. Culture & Psychology. 21. 59-80. 10.1177/1354067X15568979.

Roded, Alona & Raviv, Amiram. (2017). Self-Censorship in the Family: The Double-Edged Sword of Family Secrets. 10.1007/978-3-319-63378-7_2.