Parent selector
The :parent selector selects elements that are parents (that is, non-empty elements that contain the element or text). To get the parents or ancestors of a jQuery set, see the parent and parents methods. Since :parent is not part of the CSS spec, for better performance in modern browsers it is better to first filter the elements using a pure CSS selector, and then apply .filter(':parent').
Syntax
Getting parent elements:
$(':parent');
Example
We have a table table with a green background, let's find the cells td that are parents and color them gray:
<table>
<tr><td>aaa</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>bbb</td><td></td></tr>
<tr><td>ccc</td><td></td></tr>
</table>
table {
border: 1px;
}
td {
width: 40px;
background: green;
}
$('td:parent').css({background: '#ccc'});
