I'm a dad of a 18yo who is getting ready to graduate high school and go off to college. I divorce her mother about a decade ago, and the divorce was very acrimonious (and continues to be). My ex-wife was initially successful at alienating the two older kids from me to the extent that the oldest (the 18yo) refused to participate in shared custody. It got a little better after I was successful at getting a court to order the kids to participate in reunification therapy. The 18yo was ultimately diagnosed with ODD (oppositional defiance disorder), and from my perspective has essentially been unparentable since she was about 12. I attribute the ODD to my ex-wife's personality and permissive parenting style, but my ex attributes it to the fact that I dissolved the marriage and her belief that our daughter has a mental defect.
My current conundrum is how to navigate my relationship with my daughter now that she's 18 and leaving her mother's house to go to college. My ex-wife has never worked full time (still gets about 90% of her income from me through alimony and child support), and is a very entitled person in my view. I think that has rubbed off on my daughter. My daughter does talk to me occasionally--I call her about twice a week, and she answers maybe 15% of the time; when she does answer, I do enjoy our conversations. She never calls or texts me though. I give her an allowance through a digital debit card. I pay for many things above and beyond child support.
I'm worried what this next chapter looks like. My daughter wants to live off campus with her boyfriend immediately and has asked me to co-sign a lease; the boyfriend will not be enrolled in school. She's attending an expensive private art school out of state. She's also got a lot of arguably superfluous medical expenses because about once a year, she claims that she has "intrusive thoughts" and checks herself into a psych ward for a week. And of course there's weekly therapy bills. And she's just kind of expecting her mother and I to continue footing all of these bills, which of course ends up being mostly my responsibility because I earn about 20x what her mother earns.
I'm 100% certain that if I start to peel back my financial support for my daughter, my relationship with her is going to be eviscerated. Even worse, she's also going to tell her younger siblings that I've abandoned her, and they will buy that narrative because their mother is also going to be saying that. But at the same time, I feel like I might be contributing to her problems by enabling all of these bad decisions and lack of forming any kind of adult resiliency. But I really do want to have a loving relationship with her--I think my relationship with her is salvageable if I can figure out how to navigate this.
Should I keep taking it on the chin and supporting, or should I put some strings on my financial support? And if so, what kind of strings?