Accessing variables in a parent class?

Question

Hello everyone,
I'm rather new to java, and I've been looking at the documentation a bit but am still trying to figure out just what I am looking for. I've posted an example of such before where I have two seperate files, the parent class file and the child class file. What I want to do is somehow return the instance of parent that child was created with from the below code.
public class parent {
     protected int var;
     public static void main(String[] args) {          
          child chld = new child();
}Is it possible to get the same instance of parent that created the child? If so, can it be used to access or modify the variables held by parent? Or is it only possible to do this by creating methods to set or get the value of the variable?
Can someone point me to the proper term as well, so as I might check the manual as well?

Answer 1

Another thing I just noticed; your question does not seem to match your post's subject title. Taking that into context, it is possible to read your post very differently. Do you mean that you want to reference parent from inside of its own method, not necessarily after it has returned?
You can access an object's variables and its methods from within a method it owns. To clarify what I mean...
public class Something
    int someData = 0;
    public void someAction()
        // Something has a variable "someData" which can be accessed directly from inside of Something's own method someAction()
        someData = 5;
        System.out.println(someData);
}If you mean you want a reference to the object itself from within one of its methods, Google for the "this" keyword.
None of these have anything to do with the child object though, so I'm still a bit stumped as to what exactly you mean. Perhaps a combination of all answers received so far?
Again, you probably need to further clarify exactly what you're looking for.