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In a case that highlights the “parent as wallet” scenario playing out in family courts, in which an estranged parent questions having to support an adult child who has severed contact, a judge has struck down a father’s bid to cut off university tuition payments.

But the Ontario Superior Court justice ordered the daughter to pay substantially more of her own money toward her education, sympathizing with the father whose children’s decision to sever ties with him had been heavily influenced by their mother’s reaction to his post-marital life.

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Now that his eldest daughter is in her first year of university and will turn 19 next week, the father wanted to terminate any obligation to pay child support or her university expenses because she and her sister are now completely alienated from him despite his numerous efforts to have a relationship with them.

But Justice J. Gray wouldn’t allow it, ruling that the man and his ex-wife were both responsible for the alienation — the mother aired her grievances about the relationship to her daughters and shared financial concerns with them and the father made “clumsy and insensitive” attempts to introduce his girls to a new girlfriend he had met over the Internet before they were ready.