i read through it but i don’t see the answer for my particular question.
my thought is that it’s common for people to have wordpress websites/blogs with child pages that are intentionally not shown in the menu. but, when someone is at the child page they probably wouldn’t want the menu to show that none of the pages are active. seems logical to wish for the parent to be highlighted. am i wrong?
when i’m on a “child” page i would like the “parent” in the navigation to be highlighted/active.
wp_list_pages() adds the classes “current_page_parent” and “current_page_ancestor” to the parent list element, so you should be able to use that for highlighted styling.