When scripting in python, can you parent and later reparent?

Question

Is "parenting" something you only use when the parenting relationship will never change?

The reason I'm asking is because I successfully make animations with keyframes involving parenting objects. But whenever I try to clear parenting and reparent different objects, the animations never work.

If you clear parenting, are there multiple layers that need clearing, for example, before I can parent an object that was formerly parented? I was just doing clear parent, but it wasn't enough and the animation always fails.

Answer 1

Parent relationships are indeed meant to be permanent.

If you need dynamic relationships, you should use object or bone constraints. They all have a factor which can be animated among other things.

The most common way to make dynamic relationships is with the Child Of constraint, because it can store an offset from its parent object. But there are plenty other interesting constraints: ones that copy all transforms or just the location/rotation/scale, ones that limit transforms, damped tracks, distance constraints, ...