## parent selector

Description: Select all elements that have at least one child node (either an element or text).

- #### version added: 1.0jQuery( ":parent" )

This is the inverse of `:empty`.

One important thing to note regarding the use of `:parent` (and `:empty`) is that child nodes include text nodes.

The W3C recommends that the `<p>` element have at least one child node, even if that child is merely text (see https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#edef-P). Some other elements, on the other hand, are empty (i.e. have no children) by definition:`<input>`, `<img>`, `<br>`, and `<hr>`, for example.

To obtain the parents or ancestors of an existing jQuery set, see the `.parent()` and `.parents()` methods.

### Additional Notes:

- Because `:parent` is a jQuery extension and not part of the CSS specification, queries using `:parent` cannot take advantage of the performance boost provided by the native DOM `querySelectorAll()` method. To achieve the best performance when using `:parent` to select elements, first select the elements using a pure CSS selector, then use `.filter(":parent")`.

## Example:

Finds all tds with children, including text.

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    <!doctype html><html lang="en"><head>  <meta charset="utf-8">  <title>parent demo</title>  <style>  td {    width: 40px;    background: green;  }  </style>  <script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.10.2.js"></script></head><body> <table border="1">  <tr><td>Value 1</td><td></td></tr>  <tr><td>Value 2</td><td></td></tr></table> <script>$( "td:parent" ).fadeTo( 1500, 0.3 );</script> </body></html>

#### Demo: