# parent (0-parent.org)

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
- Says: "Tell me about my parent"
  Means: 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"
- Says: "What does a parent do"
  Means: 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"
- Says: "How do I find my parent"
  Means: 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"
- Says: "Parent and child relationship"
  Means: 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