Dad Wants His Estranged Daughter To Return $18k In Child Support If She Wants To Get Back Together

A confused father took to Reddit to ask if he was wrong to expect his daughter to repay him back $18,000 he spent on child support. He was seeking guidance as well as financial retaliation.

The father wants to mend his relationship with his estranged daughter by having her repay the money he has provided her over the years.

The father detailed how the fallout began when his 15-year-old daughter Aria “abandoned” him and their family to live with her biological mother, “Sandra,” on a full-time basis in a Reddit post.

“Sandra has always been less ‘strict’ than me,” the dad wrote. “She’s always let Aria do what she wants and has never had any home rules. She also buys Aria everything she wants so she will want to live with her.”

He recounted the events leading up to her departure, saying that her father grounded her for not keeping in touch as often as he wished during a five-day school trip abroad. The father claimed that Aria’s absence from a popular girl’s birthday celebration was a significant blow to his daughter because “she’s never had a lot of friends.”

Aria’s father informed her “that she didn’t have to come back if she didn’t want to” when her mother returned at the end of that week to pick her up. Following that, Aria followed her father’s advice and skipped going back to her father’s house.

“She didn’t love us and she preferred staying with her mother, her parties, and her free-of-rules life,” according to her father, who thought this was the reason.

Even after their falling out, her father was legally required to cover half of her education costs as well as child support.

“Over the years we’ve communicated through lawyers because Sandra has 0 intentions of helping me get my daughter back (she finally has her to herself),” the man wrote. However, he added that despite not seeing or talking to his daughter, “they’ve been demanding that I pay for child support, even now that she’s 21 years old.”

However, this didn’t sit well with the father, who felt it was unfair to have to support a child who didn’t want to see him — so he devised a plan that he hoped would recuperate both the money he spent in child support over the years as well as his daughter’s favor.

“When Aria turned 18, an adult, I started adding up everything I had to pay in an Excel that I send to Sandra when I update it so she knows what damage she is doing to our daughter,” the father wrote.

The father clarified that he expected his daughter to “pay her debt” before they could reconnect.

After years of estrangement, the man wrote that his now 21-year-old daughter “has been trying to get in touch again.” However, $18,000 stands between them.

“I told her that we can’t fix the emotional part unless we fix the money part first,” he said, explaining that he believed “she needs to prove to me that she doesn’t only care about the money.”

“I expect Aria to pay her debt, but I gave Sandra the option to pay for her to which she refused,” the father wrote. “We are now at 18K.”