Element: children property

Baseline Widely available

This feature is well established and works across many devices and browser versions. It’s been available across browsers since July 2015.

The read-only children property returns a live HTMLCollection which contains all of the child elements of the element upon which it was called.

Element.children includes only element nodes. To get all child nodes, including non-element nodes like text and comment nodes, use Node.childNodes.

Value

An HTMLCollection which is a live, ordered collection of the DOM elements which are children of node. You can access the individual child nodes in the collection by using either the item() method on the collection, or by using JavaScript array-style notation.

If the element has no element children, then children is an empty list with a length of 0.

Examples

js
const myElement = document.getElementById("foo");
for (const child of myElement.children) {
  console.log(child.tagName);
}

Specifications

Specification
DOM Standard
# ref-for-dom-parentnode-children①

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also