Basic Trope: An absentee parent tries to get their children's love with expensive gifts and/or a laxer parenting style.
- Straight: Bob is divorced from Alice and only gets visitation rights with their children, Adam and Betty, once a month. So when he visits, he spends lots of money and lets them run amok.
- Exaggerated: Bob is one step above a Glorified Sperm Donor, only visiting once a year despite having the ability to visit more. When he does visit, Adam and Betty get to live like Jeff Bezos' kids.
- Downplayed: When Bob visits, he takes Betty and Adam to high-end local restaurants Alice can't afford to go to, but he still makes sure they do their homework and behave themselves.
- Justified:
- Bob is afraid of his children forgetting about him, so he wants to be memorable.
- Bob is very rich as it is, and sees no reason why his children should suffer just so his ex-wife or her new husband can save face.
- Bob's job forces him to spend long periods of time away from home, pays well, but there's little that he can spend it on due to the aforementioned long periods away, so he spends big on his children when he does get to visit.
- Inverted:
- Alice is very rich, and when Bob visits, he can only afford to take the children to inexpensive activities like playing ball in the park or camping in the local woods.
- Even though Alice is the richer one, Bob wins over the kids through less expensive but more meaningful activities.
- Subverted: It turns out Alice got rich since her divorce, so Bob's lavish gifts are just par for the course in Adam and Betty's lives.
- Double Subverted: Until Bob takes it up a notch by buying them private islands.
- Parodied:
- Bob literally works at Disneyland.
- Bob's gifts for his kids are what even many working-class viewers would consider Mundane Luxury, but in-universe they are luxurious because Alice is even poorer.
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted: Bob doesn't act differently than he did before he got divorced.
- Enforced: ???
- Lampshaded:Alice: Bob's got the kids today.Chuck: Disneyland again?Alice: Well, Universal Studios, but practically the same thing.Chuck: Yeah, he's got no other tricks up his sleeve.
- Invoked: Bob didn't plan to go to Disneyland the first time he got to see his kids after the divorce, but he had some spare cash and time, and based on their reactions they appreciated it. He drew arguably the wrong lesson from it, though.
- Exploited: Adam and Betty manipulate Bob into spending even more by acting unimpressed at his gifts and always talking about how well Mom treats them.
- Defied: Alice puts her foot down and tells Bob that if he doesn't stop the trips to Disneyland she'll cut off his custody entirely.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Alice angrily complains that Bob makes her look boring and mean by comparison because she's the one who has to do the everyday work of parenting while he just swoops in and throws around cash. Bob retorts he wouldn't feel the need to impress their children so much if Alice agreed to split custody more fairly and that he thinks she's trying to push him out of their lives. He points out that the law is on his side here and that he deserves to be more than a stranger to his children.
- When Bob goes through sudden hard times, he can no longer afford lavish gifts and his children quickly lose interest in him.
- Reconstructed: After the argument, Alice calls Bob up again after cooling down and the two of them agree to a compromise: no more expensive gifts or trips outside of special occasions, but in return Bob gets to see his children three days out of the week with alternating weekends (as opposed to the one visit per month he was previously given).
