:parent Selector
Select all elements that have at least one child node (either an element or text).
.parent()
This is the inverse of :empty.
One important thing to note regarding the use of :parent (and :empty) is that child nodes include text nodes.
The W3C recommends that the <p> element have at least one child node, even if that child is merely text (see https://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/text.html#edef-P). Some other elements, on the other hand, are empty (i.e. have no children) by definition: <input>, <img>, <br>, and <hr>, for example.
To obtain the parents or ancestors of an existing jQuery set, see the .parent() and .parents() methods.
Finds all tds with children, including text.
JS
<table border="1">
<tr>
<td>Value 1</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>Value 2</td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</table>
CSS
td {
width: 40px;
background: green;
}
HTML
$("td:parent").fadeTo(1500, 0.3);
DEMO