Relative Terms

The terms "parent class" and "child class" are not absolute. A class is the parent for a child class derived from it and is the child of the class it was derived from. Just as with human relationships an individual is a child to some relatives and a parent to others. The syntax for deriving a child class from a parent class is:

class childClass extends parentClass
{
   // new characteristics of the child class go here
    
}

You have already seen this in creating applets:

class yourApplet extends Applet
{
  // new characteristics of your applet go here
  
}

Many of the characteristics of the applets you have written were inherited from the base class Applet. The base class has code to handle all the details of interfacing with the web browsers, with setting up graphics, and other things. You get all that automatically by inheritance. All you need to do is add the additional characteristics you want.