Hello, I've been thinking of switching one of my projects to use boost::smart_ptr and I'm currently investigating this option a bit. In my project there are a lot of cases where an object acts as factory/parent object to create other child objects. These child objects must keep the parent object alive as long as one of them still exists. Or in other words, even if the client does not hold a pointer to the parent object anymore, the parent must continue to exist as long as there is still a child object. Also the child objects sometimes need to have access to the parent object that created them. Therefore, I thought I'd have them hold a shared_ptr to the parent object. So the situation looks something like this, where both Parent and Child objects are only allocated on the heap and should only be passed around as shared_ptr. class Parent { public: boost::shared_ptr<Child> CreateChild() const { boost::shared_ptr<Child> child(new Child(this)); return child; } }; class Child { friend class Parent; protected: Child(const boost::shared_ptr<Parent> parent) : m_parent(parent) {} private: boost::shared_ptr<Parent> m_parent; }; As far as I understand it I can't do new Child(this) because Child expects a shared_ptr, so I'd have to derive Parent from enable_shared_from_this. However, in my project there are a number of classes in a rather complicated class hierarchy to which the above pattern applies and I'd thus like to avoid having to (multiply) derive them from enable_shared_from_this. Is there another, possibly better way of achieving what I want to do (keep the parent alive as long as there are still child objects) that I haven't discovered yet? Or do I really have to derive all these classes from enable_shared_from_this? Do I have to derive each class in a class hierarchy from enable_shared_from_this, if each of them needs to give out a shared_ptr-managed this pointer? Thanks for any help, Martin