How to get a parent element to appear above child

I have two nested CSS elements. I need to get the parent to be on top, that is, above in z-axis, of the child element. Just setting z-index is not sufficient.

I can't set a negative z-index on the child, that'll set it to below the page container on my actual page. Is this the only method?

http://jsbin.com/ovafo/edit

.parent {
  position:  relative;
  width: 750px;
  height: 7150px;
  background: red;
  border: solid 1px #000;
  z-index: 1;
}
.child {
  position: absolute;
  background-color: blue;
  z-index: 0;
  color: white;
  top: 0;
}
.wrapper
{
  position: relative;
  background: green;
  z-index: 10;
}

<div class="wrapper">
  <div class="parent">
    parent parent
    <div class="child">
      child child child
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

Set a negative z-index for the child, and remove the one set on the parent.

.parent {
    position: relative;
    width: 350px;
    height: 150px;
    background: red;
    border: solid 1px #000;
}
.parent2 {
    position: relative;
    width: 350px;
    height: 40px;
    background: red;
    border: solid 1px #000;
}
.child {
    position: relative;
    background-color: blue;
    height: 200px;
}
.wrapper {
    position: relative;
    background: green;
    height: 350px;
}

<div class="wrapper">
    <div class="parent">parent 1 parent 1
        <div class="child">child child child</div>
    </div>
    <div class="parent2">parent 2 parent 2
    </div>
</div>

https://jsfiddle.net/uov5h84f/

Fortunately a solution exists. You must add a wrapper for parent and change z-index of this wrapper for example 10, and set z-index for child to -1:

.parent {
    position: relative;
    width: 750px;
    height: 7150px;
    background: red;
    border: solid 1px #000;
    z-index: initial;
}

.child {
    position: relative;
    background-color: blue;
    z-index: -1;
    color: white;
}

.wrapper {
    position: relative;
    background: green;
    z-index: 10;
}

<div class="wrapper">
    <div class="parent">parent parent
        <div class="child">child child child</div>
    </div>
</div>

Some of these answers do work, but setting position: absolute; and z-index: 10; seemed pretty strong just to achieve the required effect. I found the following was all that was required, though unfortunately, I've not been able to reduce it any further.

HTML:

<div class="wrapper">
    <div class="parent">
        <div class="child">
            ...
        </div>
    </div>
</div>

CSS:

.wrapper {
    position: relative;
    z-index: 0;
}

.child {
    position: relative;
    z-index: -1;
}

I used this technique to achieve a bordered hover effect for image links. There's a bit more code here but it uses the concept above to show the border over the top of the image.

http://jsfiddle.net/g7nP5/

You would need to use position:relative or position:absolute on both the parent and child to use z-index.

Since your divs are position:absolute, they're not really nested as far as position is concerned. On your jsbin page I switched the order of the divs in the HTML to:

<div class="child"><div class="parent"></div></div>

and the red box covered the blue box, which I think is what you're looking for.

Cracked it. Basically, what's happening is that when you set the z-index to the negative, it actually ignores the parent element, whether it is positioned or not, and sits behind the next positioned element, which in your case was your main container. Therefore, you have to put your parent element in another, positioned div, and your child div will sit behind that.

Working that out was a life saver for me, as my parent element specifically couldn't be positioned, in order for my code to work.

I found all this incredibly useful to achieve the effect that's instructed on here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5210033/show-div-on-hover-with-only-css

style:

.parent{
  overflow:hidden;
  width:100px;
}

.child{
  width:200px;
}

body:

<div class="parent">
   <div class="child"></div>
</div>