Hi,
In order to help you people need to clearly understand what your situation and issue is.
My personal opinion is that you need to explain a lot more about what you mean:
parent pages are not linking to my child pages
What do you mean by this? That there should be a link in a page that links to another page?
You need to put those links in manually if that is what you mean.
WP does not link pages to other pages automatically.
child pages are creating separate parent tabs at the top
Well again in WP child pages dont create anything. So what do you mean by this?
Also what do you mean by Parent tabs?
The top of what?
If you mean you want to have a menu link for a parent page in the menu at the top of a typical WP install, and you want the child pages to be shown as sub-menu items, then you need to create that yourself in the Menu settings. Or there may be a plugin.