A child is not always a parent!

Don’t use the parent/child terminology when discussing inheritance relations.

The parent/child terminology is appropriate when discussing “has-a” relations. (A parent has a child, and a child has a parent.) In other words, this

/home is the parent directory of /home/aioobe

and this

The abcd node is a child of the abc node in a trie

is perfectly fine.

An inheritance relation on the other hand, is an “is-a” relation, as in

A Cat is an Animal

It does’t make sense to say that an Animal is the parent of a Cat or that a Cat is a child of an Animal (at least not when there’s only one cat around). A parent and a child doesn’t have an is a relation with each other.

In the case of inheritance there’s always a better terminology: Superclass and subclass. So, instead of saying for instance

Animal is the parent of Cat

say

Animal is the superclass of Cat

</rant>