A father spends years saving for his child’s future, only to find out the daughter he thought was thriving in college has been faking her success. When the truth finally surfaces, he decides he is done footing the bill. The standoff that follows is not just about tuition, it is about trust, entitlement, and what parents actually owe their adult kids.
Online, that basic scenario has played out again and again, with one dad after another asking strangers if cutting off college money over lies makes them the villain. The answers reveal a sharp cultural divide over whether paying for higher education is a parental duty or a conditional privilege.
The Lie, the GPA, and the Broken Trust
In one widely discussed case, a father explained that he had agreed to pay for his daughter’s degree as long as she kept her grades up and stayed honest about how she was doing. For years, she sent him screenshots of what looked like solid marks, only for him to discover that the images were fake and that she had actually been struggling. His original post on Reddit framed the dilemma bluntly: if the entire relationship around tuition is built on a lie, is he really obligated to keep writing checks.
When he dug into the records, he learned that his daughter’s real GPA was a 2.1, far below what she had been claiming. She had not just hidden a bad semester, she had built an entire story around doctored grades and curated screenshots. That level of deception is what pushed him to say he would no longer cover her education costs, a decision that quickly drew thousands of reactions from readers who saw the lie as a bigger problem than the number on her transcript.
Internet Juries and the Question of “Spoiled” Kids
Once the father’s story hit the internet, the informal court of public opinion moved fast. In one Comments Section, a user named Nephyllem summed up a common reaction with a simple verdict: NTA, or “not the asshole,” because the daughter had “straight up lied” and was now trying to guilt her way back into the same pattern. Another commenter in the same thread argued that if a parent caves after that kind of deception, they are “very likely raising a spoiled brat,” a sentiment that appeared in a separate discussion about cutting off a child financially for similar reasons.
Variations on this conflict keep surfacing. One father described in a Video Transcript how he and his wife had a 20 year old daughter whose lies about school and living arrangements pushed them to reconsider paying her tuition. Another parent on Reddit said that if their 19 year old daughter “doesn’t have any responsibility towards the family anymore,” then the parents “can get the eff out” of paying for her college and rent, a stance laid out in an Aug post that framed financial support as a two way street.
Who Controls the Money, and Who Controls the Major
Underneath the outrage sits a quieter power struggle about who gets to steer a young adult’s life when parents are paying. In one case highlighted in Jun, a dad insisted on choosing his daughter’s field of study as the price of covering her tuition, a dynamic that sparked debate over whether parents should be able to mandate a kid’s major in exchange for money. The daughter lied about what she was studying to keep the peace, a choice that later exploded when the truth came out and was dissected in a parenting piece that asked whether that kind of control is ever healthy.
Other parents try to split the difference by paying for some costs but not others. One father explained that he was covering his daughter’s classes out of long term college savings while refusing to fund her campus housing, arguing that he wanted her to “learn the value” of money and work, a balance he described in a Jun post about college housing and summer classes. Another thread from Oct featured commenters asking a man who refused to pay for a child he barely knew whether he wanted any relationship with her at all, suggesting that money and contact are often tangled together in ways that go far beyond tuition bills.
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