jQuery :parent Selector

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 http://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.