parent
A parent is a mother or father. People also use it for anyone who raises a child, or for the source of something, like the parent company that owns a smaller business.
What a model may hear
- parent process operating systems
- spawn a child process and wait for or control it
- parent node trees and graphs
- treat the term as a node with children in a data structure
- parent class object-oriented programming
- look for inheritance relationships and method overriding
- parent directory file systems
- move up one level in a path hierarchy
- parent element HTML/XML DOM
- traverse up the document tree from a child element
Where people and models part ways
“Tell me about my parent”
Meant: biography or relationship advice
May be taken as: explain process forking or return the parent directory path
Say instead: “Tell me about my mother or father as a person”
“What does a parent do”
Meant: parenting duties and child-rearing
May be taken as: describe the role of a parent process in managing child processes
Say instead: “What are the responsibilities of raising a child”
“How do I find my parent”
Meant: family history or genealogy
May be taken as: return the parent node ID or directory path
Say instead: “How do I research my biological parents”
“Parent and child relationship”
Meant: family dynamics or psychology
May be taken as: explain inheritance in programming or process trees
Say instead: “Emotional bond between a mother or father and their child”
Tips
- Say 'mother or father' when you mean a person, not 'parent'
- Add 'in a family' or 'in parenting' to keep the model on the human track
- Avoid 'parent-child' phrasing unless you want technical results
- Say 'owning company' instead of 'parent company' if you want business, not trees
- If you mean inheritance, say 'base class' or 'superclass' to be precise
Often confused with
- ancestor
- any prior generation, not just immediate parent
- root
- topmost node, not the one directly above
- guardian
- legal caretaker, not necessarily biological
- supervisor
- work manager, not family role
- owner
- property holder, not relational source
- predecessor
- prior version or holder, not hierarchical parent