jQuery .children()

Given a jQuery object that represents a set of DOM elements, the .children() method allows us to search through the children of these elements in the DOM tree and construct a new jQuery object from the matching elements. The .children() method differs from .find() in that .children() only travels a single level down the DOM tree while .find() can traverse down multiple levels to select descendant elements (grandchildren, etc.) as well. Note also that like most jQuery methods, .children() does not return text nodes; to get all children including text and comment nodes, use .contents().

The .children() method optionally accepts a selector expression of the same type that we can pass to the $() function. If the selector is supplied, the elements will be filtered by testing whether they match it.

Consider a page with a basic nested list on it:

<ul class="level-1">
 <li class="item-i">I</li>
 <li class="item-ii">II
 <ul class="level-2">
 <li class="item-a">A</li>
 <li class="item-b">B
 <ul class="level-3">
 <li class="item-1">1</li>
 <li class="item-2">2</li>
 <li class="item-3">3</li>
 </ul>
 </li>
 <li class="item-c">C</li>
 </ul>
 </li>
 <li class="item-iii">III</li>
</ul>

If we begin at the level-2 list, we can find its children:

$( "ul.level-2" ).children().css( "background-color", "red" );

The result of this call is a red background behind items A, B, and C. Since we do not supply a selector expression, all of the children are part of the returned jQuery object. If we had supplied one, only the matching items among these three would be included.