Node: parentNode 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 parentNode property of the Node interface returns the parent of the specified node in the DOM tree.

Document and DocumentFragment nodes can never have a parent, so parentNode will always return null. It also returns null if the node has just been created and is not yet attached to the tree. Node.parentElement on the other hand only returns Element nodes.

Value

A Node that is the parent of the current node. The parent of an element is an Element node, a Document node, or a DocumentFragment node.

Example

Using parentNode

This example removes a node from the tree, unless it's not in the tree already.

js
if (node.parentNode) {
  node.parentNode.removeChild(node);
}

Specifications

Specification
DOM Standard
# ref-for-dom-node-parentnode①

Browser compatibility

BCD tables only load in the browser

See also