# parent (10-parent.org)

A parent is a mother or father. People also use it to mean anyone who raises or cares for a child, or more loosely, the source or origin of something.

## What a model may hear
- parent process (operating systems and programming): assume the user wants to fork, spawn, or manage child processes and may write shell commands or system calls
- parent node (trees, graphs, and data structures): build or traverse hierarchical structures like DOM elements, XML, or decision trees
- parent class (object-oriented programming): infer inheritance relationships, method overriding, or class hierarchies in Python, Java, or C++
- parent directory (file systems and command lines): navigate up one level with `cd ..` or reference paths relative to the current folder

## Where people and models part ways
- Says: "I need to contact the parent"
  Means: call my child's mother or father
  May be taken as: look up the parent process ID or send a signal to a system process
  Say instead: "I need to call my child's mother or father"
- Says: "show me the parent"
  Means: display the person in charge
  May be taken as: print the parent directory or node in a tree structure
  Say instead: "who is the person in charge here"
- Says: "it has no parent"
  Means: the child is an orphan or independent
  May be taken as: assume a root node, null pointer, or process with PPID 1
  Say instead: "no one raised or oversees it"

## Tips
- Say 'mother or father' if you mean a person, not a system relationship.
- Add 'directory' or 'folder' if you mean the level above in a file path.
- Add 'class' or 'inherits from' if you mean object-oriented code.
- Say 'previous step' or 'earlier stage' instead of parent if you mean a workflow.
- Specify 'in the family tree' if you mean genealogy, not data structures.

## Often confused with
- ancestor: any level above, not just one level up
- root: the single topmost origin, not any direct predecessor
- guardian: a legal caretaker, not a biological or code relationship
- child: the opposite direction in a hierarchy
- supervisor: a manager of people, not a system process or class